robbob2112
Doing more research, mosty harmless
Your battery is likely receiving around 150 watts when your 3 panels are in full sun with no shading. As soon as a cloud passes over or an airplane or anything that casts a shadow on any part of a panel the 50 watts that panel is producing dips momentarily or drops to nothing. Your days are sunny enough that you should be able to charge the battery during the day and use it a few hours at night.
I am going to over simplify here - all numbers below are just spitball guesses
So, assume you have 5 hours of full sun on the panels during the day with NO shadows on them at all. That will give you 150watts x 5hrs = 750watt hours.
Assume your computer and monitor draw 100 watts and you use it while the sun is shining. That reduces the power going into the battery to 50watts x 5 hours = 250watt hours.
So if your computer and monitor is off during the day you can use it for 7.5 hours at night. If they are on during the day you can use them for 2.5 hours in the night.
What I left out was the conversion losses - the PWM is not very efficient and the inverter you have is not very efficient.
PWM as a class are just not as efficient as the MPPT I am recommending as your next buy since you are currently working. The MPPT will get more of the 150w from your panels into the batteries. Say the PWM is shoving 110watts of the 150 into the battery. The MPPT will shove around 140w into the battery.
I can tell your inverter is not efficient because it generates a lot of heat - all that heat is wasted power.
