Radar Trailer - Solar Charging System

One of the things that made me very happy to invest in this trailer is the fact that it had a 50 watt solar panel mounted on front of the unit.  I knew if I had to go out and purchase a new 50 watt soler pannel I would have to spend over a hundred dollars on one.  So the fact that this has one is a huge bonus.

Here are the specs on the solar panel:

It is  connected to a SCI mark III 15 amp charge controller.  I like this because of the analog meters.  The top one will show the battery bank voltage once they are installed.  The bottom meter will show the amps that the panel or panels (when I add panels later)  I have other MPPT charge controllers that I could upgrade the system with, but then I would not have the cool analog meters to look at and i'd have a big hole to fill.

I found the SCI mark III/15 owners manual here

Did you notice that I have temporally removed the fuse on the charge controller?  Even with the batteries removed and the panel facing down away from the sun, the panels still provide more than enough power to run the alarm system which I have not been able to figure out how to disarm yet.

All of the wires are routed behind this panel

on this side of the panel there is a mystery switch, some led indicators, and two 12v outlets.  On the other side there is a single 12v outlet.

Look at this mess, I'm not much of an electrician so it is going to take awhile to figure this out.

I think this is a good place to mount my xantrex prowatt 1000 true sign wave inverter.  Then Run a small cord over to the plug outlet you can see on the outside of the trailer.  First I would need to change the change it to a female.  Right now it has a male plug, so you can plug wall power in to the unit to power a 120v battery charger if needed.

Another cool possibility is once I upgrade the solar panels is to wire in a grid tie inverter so when the batteries are charged it diverts to grid-tie mode to put juice back in the grid when it is parked near a structure. ( I'll keep this in mind)