etrailer PWM Solar Charge Controller - 30 Amp - 12V, 24V, 36V, and 48V

Video Transcript for etrailer PWM Solar Charge Controller Feature Review

Hello, neighbors, it's Brad here at etrailer and today, we're taking a look at the etrailer 30 amp solar charge controller. The solar panel is gonna take the sun's energy and send it to our main unit here, which you can see has a nice digital display, so it's gonna let us know that we're getting that sunlight to trickle charge our happy little battery. And what's really nice, too, is it makes for a nice, easy installation. You can have everything labeled here as to where your wires go, and it makes the installation that much easier. And you also have some USB charging ports, which is really nice to have on hand. Solar energy has definitely become more popular as time goes on, and for good reason, the prices come down quite a bit and also it's become really easy to put it on something like an enclosed trailer like we have today, your camper.

If you have a van and you're doing the van life thing, having that solar panel means that you're gonna be able to kinda keep your batteries topped off and have electricity as long as you have sunlight. Being able to have the sun give you that extra energy to really just top off your batteries and keep everything going means that whether you're out on a job site or camping, you don't have to worry about getting electricity to plug into for some of your essentials. It comes with all the wiring included, so pretty easy. You're just gonna take the plugs that plug into the solar panel, run those into your camper or RV and then these just go into the solar panel portion, tighten those down, and then you just have two wires that run to your battery, so that way, the solar energy can trickle charge your battery during the daylight. The digital display is really good at letting you know what's happening.

So we have sun on our panel going to our battery, which is then going to any additional things that you'd be running off of that battery power. So, as this is going, we know that we're getting solar energy, and as we scroll through, it's gonna let you know a few different things. There's temperature, but also, as you watch at the top left, it's really gonna give you a readout of solar panel to battery. And here we have 3.6 amps, and that's really what's gonna be important. As this trickle charges your battery, this is kinda the rating that it's going into it.

So that's really the positive of solar. Your battery's gonna stay fully charged with the sunlight topping it off as we go. And this is gonna work with a bunch of different types of batteries. So, depending on what you have, you're gonna wanna refer to your instruction manual to make sure that you're getting it properly set up and also to really fully understand all of the settings that you do have on your control panel. It's all really easy to get in place, but if you're worried about if your camper's too large to get this, as far as wiring goes, here to tell you that there's quite a bit of extra wire.

Obviously, our enclosed trailer's pretty short, but if you have a longer application, you're gonna have enough wiring to be able to get there, the module mounted up exactly where you want it. And something to consider as well is with your solar panel, you wanna make sure that you have a nice solid mounting point up on the roof, so you may need to pick up some brackets or a roof rack to be able to get that to mount up properly. And to begin our installation, I've just flipped our panel over. I used the foam that was included in the packaging just to make sure that that's protected. And here we find that there's some holes that are mounted on the frame here, and we're gonna be using the outside holes on both side. The center one is gonna be for ground. So the brackets included, right here, and this is gonna be pretty easy to just kinda mount up. We're gonna have these tabs facing down, so it's gonna raise up the panel, and I'm gonna make mine nice and tight. It's slotted here, so you can adjust that as necessary. Included for our mounting bracket is gonna be a serrated flange nut and our bolt. And this is just gonna take a 10-millimeter socket and wrench to get this tightened down. Now, if you haven't already figured out your mounting point and you can worry about that later, but you do have some adjustability. So what I've found measuring from the outside edge, but this all the way pushed in, it comes in at 30 and a quarter, so you do have a little bit. You could probably bump that out depending on your mounting situation. But I'm gonna go ahead. I'll get all my brackets mounted up. Now, as far as getting this mounted up, you are gonna need a nice, solid mounting surface. We went ahead and picked up a aluminum ladder rack that we mounted up on our enclosed trailer. This is the Rack'em Fitz-All, which works out really well. It's adjustable for an enclosed trailer, and it really allows us to get a perfect fit for our brackets. Now you're gonna need an extra set of hands to get this up in place, but I highly recommend, do not touch the solar panel with your hands if you can try to touch elsewhere. But we're gonna get this kinda lined up. We do have our plugs on this side and that's something to keep note of because when we run power in, in our plugs, we're gonna wanna make sure it's in the spot that we want it. So we've centered this up exactly where we want it. And included is gonna be these self-tapping screws, so we're gonna go ahead and drill this into our ladder rack. I'm just gonna put one in each corner, and then we'll come back and make sure that we put an extra one in each bracket. (power drill whirring) Our next step is gonna be routing our cables inside to our charge panel. Now, something that's important to kinda take note of, don't hook this up until the very end because it's gonna start trying to get power from that panel, so you wanna make sure that's not the case. What I'm gonna do is just kinda make sure I leave myself enough room. These are zip-tied up, so if I needed any extra wire, I could always pull that out. But get a nice, clean run, and these are gonna have to go inside, obviously. So, as far as getting those routed through, what we're gonna be using today that's not included in the kit, but I highly recommend, this is the cable entry plate. This is specifically for the MC4 solar cables. This is really nice because you can feed your wires in, it's gonna mount up and have a nice spot for them to pass through. I'm also gonna be using these nuts here to tighten it down. That way, those wires aren't pulling or straining. And I do recommend maybe putting a little bit of butyl as you mount up on a flat surface or close to flat and also a little RTV, again, just to make sure we don't get water through there. So, I got these routed through. We're ready to pass this in. I also made sure that we have enough wiring from the solar panel to plug in exactly where we want it. So I'm just gonna go ahead. I'm gonna use a pretty large drill bit here to pass them through because we are gonna be using some butyl and again, sealing this up, so it should be nice and watertight here. So it's just gonna make it easier for us to get our wires ran through. So, just gonna mock this up here, and it's gonna be right in this area. So, I'll go ahead and get that drilled out. (power drill whirring) And then we'll pass both our wires through and pull out the slack. And just for a little added protection, I just went ahead, I found a rubber grommet that I have here and that's gonna also help seal up this hole, so we'll get these wires passed in. And this butyl is pretty common when you mount anything on the outside of a camper. It just makes sure that long term, once you drill this down, it's gonna create that nice seal, and we're not gonna have water going into our camper. And that's our main goal here. (power drill whirring) And with this mounted up, we have our butyl pushing out. I went pretty excessive on it, but that's not a bad thing because this is gonna create that nice watertight seal. So now we can head inside and continue on with the installation. So we have all of our excess wires pulled in here, and we're gonna be routing that over to our solar controller, and we're gonna wanna find a nice place to mount this that's gonna be in range of those wires to attach to. And I think we're gonna mount it up on the outside of this cabinet. And we are gonna be attaching the wires to the front, so you're gonna wanna make sure that you have holes drilled for those. That way, you can make those attachment points. (power drill whirring) I've routed my wires. I'm gonna go back with a loom clamp and just kinda make that a little bit cleaner like I did underneath the cabinet. I then figured out exactly where I need to drill through to get our wires attached to our charge unit. Now, pretty easy on the front, there's gonna denote exactly where we need to plug it in. You can see here that we have the solar panel little grid here, and a positive-negative, so we're just gonna back out these Phillips head screws and we'll put our positive underneath here, make sure that's in place and then we'll tighten that back down. And once it's snug, just give it a quick tug to make sure that it's secure. We'll do the same thing with the negative. Next, we need to take our battery cables. You'll see those have the ring terminals already attached, so we'll just drill two more holes just like we did here and get those attached to this center one here. It's got a little battery, positive-negative, pretty easy. Now, pretty easy with our ring terminals, we're just gonna attach this to the positive and negative on the battery. The red is gonna go to our positive, so we'll get that attached. So now we need to plug in our solar panel to our plugs that we have here, and it's pretty simple because you really can't mess this up. They also have labeled these, so we have positive or a plus that'll obviously go to our red. That just snaps in, and then we'll get our negative or our black wire attached to this end. Coming back to our controller, we can see our solar panel has the arrow kinda charging up this happy little battery and then also to the light here, which is gonna be that auxiliary power. So that's a good sign that everything's working. All that's left to do is start enjoying your new power from the sun. And that was a look at the etrailer 30 amp solar charge controller.