Charge Controller Data

The Morningstar solar controller stores about 200 days of data. I plan to go up often enough to download the data and store it so that we can analyze the data. The documentation page gives information about the controller and data that it stores. I an providing the raw data files here. I will also create some plots that I think might be interesting.

The data is in a "csv" (comma separated variable) file. You can download the data sets and create your own plots. Please let me know if you do this and come up with something interesting. Full documentation can be found at the link above. A short version of the file header is here:

Column name	Definition
Vb_max_daily	minimum battery voltage
Vb_min_daily	maximum battery voltage
Va_max_daily	maximum daily input voltage
Ahc_daily	total Ah charge daily
Whc_daily	total Wh charge daily
time_equalize_daily	cumulative time in equalize
time_absorption_daily	cumulative time in absorption
time_float_daily	cumulative time in float

I may "clean up" the format a bit at some time in the future but for now the data is what is extracted from the controller. A few important notes:

• The fields are enclosed in double quotes and separated by commas. Some of the quoted fields can contain commas so you need to pay attention to this if you remove the quotes.
• The date information is based on the date that the data is downloaded, according to the laptop clock. The controller does record times that it has power removed. This can be seen in the initial data file that was extracted. The controller was first used in my back yard for testing and then sat powered off for a couple weeks before it was moved to the repeater site. However the dates show no gap but do indicate a power cycle.
• The controller needs to drive the batteries to a specific voltage before time in the absorption or float stages will be recorded. This means that if the batteries are low it is possible for charging to take place without showing any time in these stages. If time is shown in the float stage then we were able to fully charge the batteries and now additional charging was needed.

Data files:

Full data from my back yard and at the repeater site
Data downloaded November 17, 2012
Data downloaded February 16, 2013

I may add some data plots in the future as time permits. Meanwhile here is a plot showing the daily minium battery voltage and the totall watt hours of charging given.