Switch or not to Switch

[Kelvin12]

G'Day All,

When hooked up to shore power and charging house batteries would you need to switch off the solar charging.

Dirk

[T1 Terry]

No. The 2 regulators should be able to control their own power source to achieve the goal of fully charging but not over charging the battery. The story about needing to turn all but one source of charging was spread by the MPPT regulator people because their regulators would shut down if there was a second charging source on the battery. The DC to DC crowd joined in on this tale as their method of charge control suffered the same problem.
The better quality unit have now designed a better control system so the problem has been sorted to a degree for them, the poorer quality control units still suffer the same problem. Price has little to with it unfortunately, there is a well known English product that isn't cheap, yet suffers this poor design problem.
PWM type controllers don't suffer this problem at all and this has lead to the redesign of the DC to DC and MPPT control systems.
The good units no longer stop charging and read battery voltage to determine if the battery is fully charged, they use a constant voltage charging and stop when the current drops to a predetermined level. It was the stop charging and read the voltage that caused the problems if a second charging source was present, the voltage didn't drop so the controller determined the battery was full, so it just shut down.