[sailingdog]

Originally Posted by Valiente

SD...I'm still getting used to these concepts. I'm looking at 4 x 130W Kyocera panels or equivalent plus a 24V Air-X wind turbine that I would transform down to 12 V before it went into my charge circuit. My house banks will be circa 840 AH in 4 x 8D lead-acids and these will feed into Xantrex echo chargers, one to a single start battery and the other to a battery in the forepeak for a 1200W Lofrans windlass. The charger/inverter (already purchased) is a Xantrex RS 2000 and I have a Honda EU2000 as a tertiary backup/power tools on deck portable genset.

Could the Outback (which sounds appropriate) MPPT handle BOTH charge sources simultaneously and how does the dump/diverter relay deal with this? I have the impression that a heat sink is involved, and I would rather not have that down below, unless I could use it heat hot water!

The Outback FlexMax 60 will handle approximately 900 watts of panels or wind gen. While, I think it should be fine with the setup you've got listed above, to be safe and give yourself some expansion space, it might be wise to get the FlexMax 80 instead. . The diversion relay can be used to power a hot water heater or feed power back to the braking mechanism on a wind gen, or possibly both, depending on how complex you want to make it. You may have enough power from the four panels and the wind gen that running a hot water heater is feasible.

I'm not trying to hijack the thread so much as expand it, because your answer will illustrate the function of MPPTs in a well-designed alternative charging system.