Renogy MPPT Charge Controller Review

More than a year ago, we installed a Renogy Rover 60 MPPT solar controller to our Reconn R2 Hybrid Caravan, and its time to let you know how its going, and what we think of it. This is one item, out of a huge number of Renogy products that we’re running on our Hybrid Caravan, or Isuzu Dmax, and you should know that we paid full retail price for all of it, and are not here to sell you anything.

We’ve got an honest post on our Renogy Reviews, if that’s of interest too.

What does the Renogy MPPT Charge Controller do?

On our setup, we have three 200W Renogy solar panels feeding into the Renogy Rover MPPT. We could obviously wire more in, but I didn’t want to add too much weight to the roof, so 600W it is.

Why the Renogy MPPT Charge Controller?

After deciding to run 600W of solar, I had a good chat to our Auto Electrician, who suggested we look at an independent solar controller for this array. We already had an Enerdrive DC2DC installed, but it would have been pushing the friendship to run these panels, and it gave us some redundancy.

The way its been installed allows for the Renogy panels to always be running, with their own MPPT controller, and for the Enerdrive DC2DC available for alternator charge when driving, and we can plug a solar blanket in to top up as needed. It also gets used for the 120W panel that was already on the roof of the camper, and it all works pretty well together.

What size Renogy MPPT units are available?

Renogy do a heap of different MPPT setups, and then you can get the Renogy DCDC chargers which (some) have solar input too. In the Rover range, you can get 20, 30, 40, 60 and 100 amp controllers, which is pretty amazing.

The unit is big, and heavy

I want to point out that this 60 amp unit is a fairly large, and heavy item. When it arrived with the 3000W inverter, I wondered how on earth I’d find anywhere to fit it, but we did. It is mounted horizontally, and upside down, in a fairly tight spot with zero ventilation, which is less than ideal, but it is what it is.

A big part of this is a huge number of large fins on the rear, to help keep it cool, and that’s good to see. Overall though, it feels solid, and well built.

What voltages can it handle?

There’s a lot of solar controllers out there that do very low voltages, which can dramatically hurt what solar panels you can run. The Enerdrive DC2DC is good for 45V, which is really impressive, and the Renogy Rover is good for 140V, meaning you can run a heap of different types of panels, and even some in series.

Is it Bluetooth compatible?

If you get the Bluetooth dongle, this unit will talk to your phone. It uses the Renogy app, which is basic but works, and gives you some interesting history and real life data including controller temperature, maximum power generation, total per day, battery voltages, number of days running etc etc.

How does it perform?

I’m really happy with the Renogy MPPT solar controller. It does what its supposed to, and we’ve not had any issues with it. I will point out that I did have some frustrations with the lithium profile that is impossible to adjust (and its different to the lithium profile in the Renogy DCDC’s), and spent a far bit of time working out how to input a custom USER profile which suits the batteries better, but from a mechanical and electrical perspective its been flawless.

It sits on the side of the camper that we often point north, and gets a lot of sun, but even still doesn’t seem to ever exceed 50 degrees, which is pretty impressive. I have no doubt that the big heat sink on the rear helps this dramatically.

We’ve been running this full time for about a year now, and I can see on the app that this unit has done 33534 Ah, or 457.431kwh. To give you some perspective, that’s about 350 days of running a camping fridge with it cycling on the entire time. Alternatively, it’s the equivalent of running our Camping Induction Cooktop on full power (2000W) for 9.3 days, 24 hours a day.

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Are we happy with it?

For the price, Renogy gear is absolutely fantastic, and the Renogy MPPT Charge Controller is no exception to this. We’ve had a great run with it so far, and expect to have plenty of life from it yet. If we have issues, you’ll be the first to know about it here, but for now we are super happy with it.

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