Foxwell BT630 600 Amp Shunt Battery Monitor Review

Next up on the review list is a Foxwell BT630, 600 Amp Shunt Battery Monitor (selling on Amazon)

This worked out really well because I have two solar setups at my house. I have a fairly large system with 3 – 100 Amp hour (Ah) batteries in parallel that powers my shed.

And I have a much smaller and portable board for a single or maybe two 100 Ah batteries. I had kind of a no name shunt on that board and this Foxwell BT630 was a welcome addition.

Foxwell provided me this Shunt for free but no other payment or requests were made by them prior to publishing. My goal is to shake down the product and maybe help them with the next version with some recommendations if I stumble across any.

Spoiler Alert: There is a recommendation that I’ll be mentioning later.

Avoid This Company – Solar Portable Power Supply

One of my great joys that has stemmed from this blog is that people occasionally send me things to review.  Not only am I honored to review products and services, but I love to write about it as well.   However, it isn’t all wine and roses.   You should for sure avoid this company:

I’m not sure if the name of the company is GOODaaaCharger or Browey.  They make a portable power supply that has a built in small solar panel.

The Problem

They offered me $30 to write a positive review but declined to send me a unit to review.

Some Shady Shit

I don’t take money for reviews.  I also won’t review something if I am pressured into making it a good review.

This project was/is a tiny bit of a mess. But I’m still going to declare it a success but it was fraught with issues.  Issue number one is political.  For some reason the US is not a major supplier, and barely a supplier at all, of high tech Lithium batteries.  They all just about come from China.

I read on a website recently where someone stated that the Chinese had perfected the art form of lying.  That’s a stone cold fact.  Dealing with Chinese companies, manufacturers and shippers and you can expect to wallow in the bullshit at least once.   Enough of that.

So if you want LiFePO4 cells you have to go to China.  I got mine from Alibaba.  They are 3.2v, 200 amp hour batteries.  I bought 4 cells which would equal 12 volts when wired in series.  Total cost with busbars (to connect the cells together) was about $505.  In comparison to buy an off the shelf 12v, 200 amp hour LiFePO4 battery from a supplier would cost nearly $2000.

You also need a Battery Management System.  This cost about $90.

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In the wonderful world of solar there are different types of storage batteries.  The Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries are the smartest of all batteries with battery management systems, temperature controls which reduce the charge rate when it is really hot and stop it all together when the battery itself is below freezing.  Heck I’ve seen some batteries that have USB chargers built into them.

Charge controllers are just as smart as are the battery monitoring systems and they have a myriad of settings that is tough to decode.

If you go to the Battleborn Batteries website they have components they recommend for their batteries.  Seems they love the Victron stuff.  Under MPPT Charge Controllers it is all Victron.  Consequently their support pages have all the requisite settings for optimizing your battery charging.

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4 – Renogy 100 watt SolarPanels

I finally got my last 2 solar panels for my array and got them mounted up and now I can produce a whopping 12volts at around 22 amps.  That equals a production of about 264 watts.  In English that means my batteries will charge up and top off pretty darn fast.

Yesterday was a nice sunny day and I have never produced energy before 7:30 or 7:45.  Yesterday it started around 7:00.  By 9 AM my battery was at 13.6 volts which is actually the full operating charge.  Before noon sometime I had maxed and was on Float voltage.  And by “before noon”, I probably mean 10 or 11 because I wasn’t around to check it.

I did have a “Whoops” moment in the design.  When selecting a charge controller you take the number of watts divided by the number of volts to select how high a current regulator you need.
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Okay, I’m new at this Solar thing and far from an expert but I have learned a few things.  My goal was/is not to go off grid, it is simply to power most of the items in my bedroom with solar to stretch out gasoline for the generator in a power outage situation such as with the two hurricanes I’ve experienced since moving to Eastern North Carolina.  Secondly I’d like to save a few bucks on the electric bill, and thirdly I get a kick out of doing stuff like this.

My basic goals for solar are:

• Power a TV and Firestick for entertainment
• Power a small portable refrigerator
• Power a Shortwave receiver with an active (powered) antenna
• Power an LED lamp
• Power a 12v fan
• Power a battery recharge station to keep AM/FM/Shortwave radios powered
• Save a few bucks (with the understanding I’ll probably never recoup the cost of all this stuff)

I call this my lifeboat.  Here are a couple of things I have learned so far.

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