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Amy-
"But by morning, we are at about 12.2 or so. Usually by about 8:00 on a clear morning we can see about 5.5 amps on the solarboost display, "
So, for where you are, you are getting 12.2v x 5.5A for a total of 67.1 watts out of your 100 Watt array (assuming you have the standard 2x50W panels).
No magic.
Without the MPPT controller you'd probably be seeing 4.6A at 14.4V instead--with the extra voltage wasted. And without the panels being aimed (which of course you can quickly try yourself) you'd probably see another 20-45% drop in the amperage as well.
There's an old old joke that I suppose I'd better repeat because some of the forum members will be unfamiliar with it:
A guy goes into a bar with his dog. The bartender says, sorry, we don't allow dogs in here. The guy says, but he's a TALKING dog, he's special. Bartender, having heard everything, says Yeah sure, let's hear him talk. If he can talk you both can have a drink for free, and he sets up two shots.
So the guy points up to the ceiling and ask the dog "What's up there?" and the dog goes "ROOF!" and the bartender pulls back the two shots and says uh-uuh, not good enough. He says look, no nonsense, let's see what he really knows. Who was the greatest baseball player of all time? And the dog goes "RUTH!" and the bartender physically throws 'em both out on the street.
The guy dusts himself off, looks at the dog, and the dog looks back at him and says "What, I shoulda said DiMaggio?"
The morale being, THE DOG TALKS AT ALL. It doesn't matter whether the dog really knows baseball--he's talking at all and that should be enough.
Amps here, watts there...It ain't a nuclear pile, it IS about as effective as a solar installation can get. Whether the massive structure and installation is worth the price, is what my math teacher used to call "a simple exercise left to the reader".
I've got the feeling they could cut a grand off the price and re-engineer a much trimmer model for marine use, but this "overkill" probably impresses the customers in the OEM field operations business--and there's more of them, with more budget money, than there are sailors.
The numbers, meantime...are best taken with a grain of salt and an eye for context. And it certainly has been an education about charging, I feel like I've gotten the rude surprise that "conventional" regulators, even the 3-4-stage ones, are really obsolete power wasters compared to MPPT technology and PWM-DC. And that's from battery and power folks--not from what SolarStik had to say. It's been a real eye opener.
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