Hello a very damp modular shed. Yes, it's raining a lot now today. I Want to look at this uh, Voltmeter ameter which every now and again just says tips? What does that mean? Tips: Okay, just press the button. So volts from the solar panel currently 26.4 amps.

not very much cuz it's not very sunny. 17 Watts you can see top right? So this little energy meter um which is self-powered it's powered from the incoming solar panel wires. Um, and actually cuz of course you've just got a shunt here. it's actually powered at Night by the battery because the solar panel comes in here comes out of here and goes straight down to my 600w battery which is here.

So I think this is an A Torch product? um, it's no longer available I Quite liked it cuz it's self-powered It's got a nice backlight. um, it mounts with these screw mounts onto just wood and it's got these big connection points for your solar panel and also out to the battery. Um, but yeah, we can't get these anymore. Um I had the LCD fail at one time.

um I made a video about that. so I bought some more of these little LCD panels I think I've got about five of them and I think they came from a torch. but yeah I can't get these anymore. So I want to try and find an alternative but with these features, um, can handle the voltage of the solar panel so it needs to go up to about 50 volts.

needs to handle at least 10 amps. That's the most I've seen from the solar panel so 20 amps would be ideal. Um needs to be self-powered have a backlight and be currently available. so let's take a look look at what I eventually found and what I'm going to use in place of this because ultimately, of course I've got two solar panels.

Uh, these are the two solar panels and uh, each one of these is going to go through one of those meters to its own battery. Uh, the 6 I think it's 14 wat battery which is this one which has been in use for a couple of years and the 576 wat our battery which is this one which I've just built and is ready to be connected up. Um, we'll go on to the second solar panel. So yeah, let's go and look at what.

um I'm going to use as a replacement Voltmeter Ammeter Wattmeter. This is what I've opted for. It's called The z32 Amp and it looks like this. so large LCD uh screen area and then the connections are on this four-way terminal block and you simply got input.

uh, 6 to 200 volts and this is self-powered again. uh and then the load. The output comes from the two middle terminals. Uh.

mounting is not the best, it's just got these two uh ears on the sides. uh, supposedly for sort of pushing into an aperture in a panel. Now I think um if I get this back cover off, we could probably put an angle bracket on here and self-tap it into the plastic and just use some L brackets to screw it on some wood or something like that. Let's have a look.

let's get the back cover off and have a look inside. Uh, okay, so let's put that in there and that flips off. Yeah, there there. Uh, quite the.

PCB is set quite deep inside this box. So yeah, you could selft tap into there and use a couple of angle brackets. I think I've got a couple. actually.

Yeah, I'm thinking of this sort of thing: self-tap those into the plastic sides of this box and then use those to screw the Uh meter onto a flat wooden panel. Um, alternately. I came up with this idea where I've just got four uh component cut off wires soldered into these uh Fork terminals in one of these 15 amp uh barrier terminal strips and then that would fit in there. Oh, I think you have to tip it this way.

Yeah, that fits in there and then that also once this is tightened, that also provides a couple of mounting points and also some better connection points cuz these are a little bit small. Uh, to have power in and power out? Okay, let's uh, fire this thing up and have a look at it. So as seen from the front, negative input is on the left, so I'll screw that in there. positive input is on the right.

I'll just put my 12vt battery uh to the side here or I'll arrange that a bit. Okay, connect this to this battery. uh, can't remember what voltage I took it down to Oh 10.3 So there's the volts. Uh, there's the amps.

Now the amps is to three decimal places which I think is a little bit optimistic. Um, Watts is probably just a calculation of volts time amps actually I'll get a little light bulb put it on there. So at least we get some uh, some amps on the display. Uh, this little 1 watt light bulb uh or this voltage.

it's .91 Watts Okay, so the button on the front of the display um Cycles the bottom panel between four things: Watts Uh, wat hours. Although it actually says Watts per hour but I think they mean wat hours Uh, time Now I've got a feeling that this timer only counts when there is some power being drawn. Um, because it seems to stop when you just have voltage and no current and also effective resistance which is just a calculation r equal V over I So those four Fields it just Cycles around them. Now you can immediately see that this is a much better one button interface than the a torch unit in the shed.

Um, this doesn't do as much, but it does do a few things: Doubleclick, turns the backlight off and turns the backlight on and then press and hold for 6 seconds which is quite a long time. Goes into a set menu and here you can have alarm voltage below this top field and you'll get an alarm now. of course there's no buzzer in here, so it's a flashing light alarm. Uh, if it goes above the bottom voltage.

Uh, that times out and saves the parameters. So now I got to press and hold for 6 seconds. Again, okay, press and hold for 6 seconds which is quite a long time. So we can set the 5vt lower voltage limit and the 20 volt you pressing hold for 3 seconds I think it is to move to the next field.

it automatically jumps between the three digits. Press hold again and you can set an overpower limit, but again, it doesn't alarm, it just flashes the display, press and hold again and you can zero out the wat hour counter. like. So, press and hold again and you can zero out with a single press.

Uh, the timer and that's pretty much all this thing does. So it's nice and simple, but it's got a few additional features now. One thing this doesn't have is any means to calibrate it. Um, that I can see unless there's a pot or something.

but I think the board's going to have to come out for that. I'll try that bit later. Um, and it does appear to be a little bit out. Um, this is reading 10.3 This is 10.2 now I think uh.

previously when I was watching a varying voltage I could see that this was actually about 150 Mill Vols out. So it's a fair way out. And of course, that means that the Watts calculation is out as well. Now this three-digit current measurement I'm not entirely sure how accurate that is either.

Yes, that doesn't look terribly accurate either. My meter says uh, 0.095 95 milliamps and this is saying 86 milliamps. So if you want absolute Precision then this probably isn't the meter for you. But if you just want a quick at a glance, am I getting 5 amps or Am I getting 10 amps from the solar panel, um, then this is probably good enough.

Okay, let's have a quick look at this circuit board. now. this can take 200 volts. Um, so you can see they've got some cutouts here between presumably the 200v section and the push button.

so that, uh, the voltage doesn't get to your finger, but it doesn't look terribly good, does it? They're very, very, very thin cutouts. Yeah, it's just unfortunate positioning for that button, really. So what do we got? LCD Driver Chip: The big one there. This is a microcontroller.

This appears to be an A Serial E squared prom probably for remembering the accumulated time and wat hour parameters. Not sure what that is. It could be a power meter chip possibly I don't know. Um, these do not have any markings on them.

There's an inductor there so there's some power supply componentry uh, couple of things there and here which could be a regulator. and then there are these resistors which on the surface look like well. red, red, yellow, so 220k. So two high value resistors but also stood off the board which kind of hints that they might get warm.

Yeah, I don't quite know what they're doing there. so what I really want to do is get this PCB out cuz I can't see a current shunt I don't think these are the current shunt. Um so now the only way I can see to push this board out is to press on this button quite hard. Um, but I've also got to try and lever this this little uh, springy plastic piece which is holding the PCB in.

so I'll try and do that now right? it's out of the housing. Uh, it wasn't easy to get out. um in the end I just had to press on the display. there's no plastic sheet over the front of the display.

It is a very nice display. I mean it's extremely large. Well, backl with these two white LEDs um all that we can see on the front here is the current shunt which is a tiny little um, well it's quite large I suppose for a surface amount r002 resistor which you can see is suspended between the negative connections. The two positive connections are simply connected together and then of course, this is where the voltage is measured and the switch is there as well.

Everything else is on the back. and no, unless I can find a hidden menu. There is no adjustment for calibration, but uh yeah, if you're not too fussed about accuracy and to be quite honest on the solar panels, uh, inputs. and I'm going to put one of these: I've got two of these.

I'm going to put one on each of the two big solar panels between the panel and the battery. Um, let's connect this up. If you're not too pass about accuracy, then um, I think this is perfectly fine. Uh, why hasn't that? Come on? Uh, quite simply because I've connected this completely the wrong way around with these uh screws exposed.

I should be looking at the front of the display, not the back of it. Well, let's hope it has reverse polarity protection that's now the right way around. Let's plug it into my battery and see what we get yet. And uh yeah, that looks like it's fine, so that's it.

That's the Uh Z320 amp, uh, voltmeter, ameter wat meter wat hour meter, hour meter, and resistance meter. Not terribly accurate, but good. Big display lit up at a glance. Um, for the solar power uh, input? that's going into my batteries, right? Let's take a look on AliExpress at this thing and where I got it? So here is this item on AliExpress Um I Got it from the CI Boom store Um, $560 Now the shipping is $1.99 but free if you order over $10 worth of stuff.

So two of these would qualify for free shipping. Um, and the description is DC Voltmeter Ameter Wattmeter Um, it's self-powered Anything from 6 volts to 200 volts and the current is up to 20 amps. And so that's it for this video. This is the Voltmeter Ammeter Wat Meter um which is going to measure solar power coming into my battery in the shed.

But uh, for now, Cheerio.