Some what unfortunately the Projecta IDC25L which should both take power from the car (Anderson Plug) and Solar panels has died. It seems the last charge the battery received was on Friday at Kalgoorlie Caravan park (until we unplugged it on Saturday morning). So all day up to the Gascoyne Branch and then to Karijini it didn't receive any power. Fine except Karijini provide toilets and showers, not power! What to do?
Gail offered lots of encouragement that it wasn't a disaster and we could manage. Brian wasn't so sure.
Fortunately Brian had been concerned that the Projecta only seemed to want to top up the battery when it saw a significant charge, so it wasn't using the little 20W panel to stop the gradual loss of power over time and had bought the smallest Victron MPPT charger just for this little panel. After careful reading of the Victron manual it seems it will handle an over sized input and only let 10A (120W) through to the battery. So we plugged the 2 big panels in to the Victron and pretty much from first light to last light could drive 10A into the battery. This might just get us to the coast where caravan parks can top the battery up. Clearly the battery will do 2 days of our use without running out.
Exmouth will be OK, need to see what happens from there on!
So do we buy a direct replacement for the Projecta eg Redarc that will do both jobs or go the Victron way and install separate DCDC chargers in parallel with a larger MPPT (so we get more out of the panels).
I guess the Projecta is now a few years old, but a very frustrating time to die and lucky that the small panel needed something to manage it and we effectively had a spare.