A pallet of finished charge controllers, photographed on the workshop floor. Ten to a pallet, consecutive serial numbers, the same yellow warning sticker in the same place on every one. This is the least flattering picture we take and the one that tells you the most.
What the box actually does.
A wind turbine does not produce electricity you can put in a battery. The generator puts out three-phase alternating current whose voltage and frequency rise and fall with the wind, second by second. A battery wants steady direct current at a voltage it chooses. The Magnum Charge Controller is the box that stands between those two facts: it rectifies the AC to DC, holds the output where you set it, and decides what to do when the wind gives it more than the battery can take.
That last part is the job that matters. Our published figures for this unit are power management up to 15 kW, batteries from 24 to 48 volts, and it works with every TESUP turbine. It also carries automatic turbine protection and a manual emergency brake — because the failure mode of small wind is not the turbine stopping, it is the turbine not stopping.
Every argument you can have about this product is printed on the front of it, in the order you will use it.
Three wires in, two wires out.
Along the bottom edge are three positions marked WIND, with the word TURBINE bracketed underneath them. Three, because the generator is three-phase. There is no polarity to get wrong on those three: swap any two and the machine works exactly as before. It is one of the few connections in a renewable installation you genuinely cannot make backwards, and that is not an accident of the design so much as a happy property of three-phase rectification.
The DC side is the pair of MC4 connectors on the top edge, with + and − stamped beside them. MC4 is the connector the solar industry settled on years ago — keyed, latching, rated for outdoor use, and hard to mate wrongly without meaning it. Using it here is not clever. It is the opposite of clever, and that is the argument for it: an installer who has wired a solar array has already wired this.
Between them sits a circular multi-pin socket marked SENSOR, a three-digit display, and a machined knob. The knob is the voltage setting, adjustable on the box itself. That means the unit can be read and set by somebody standing in front of it in a field, with no phone, no app and no signal — which is where these boxes actually live.
The stub on the left-hand side is the radio. The knob on the front is what you use when the radio is not the answer.
The short black stub screwed into the side is the antenna for the IoT link, which is how the unit reports to a phone. We think remote monitoring is worth having and we ship it as standard. We also think a controller whose only interface is an app is a controller you cannot fix on a wet Tuesday, which is why the knob and the display are still on the front panel and always will be.
The stickers are the honest part.
On the face of every unit in these photographs, in the same position, is a yellow label reading HIGH VOLTAGE! — OUTDOOR USE ONLY. Next to the terminals is a CE mark. Neither is decoration, and neither is there to reassure you.
A wind turbine generates whenever its rotor turns. It does not wait to be switched on and it does not stop because you have opened something. That means the turbine terminals on this box can be live while nothing is powered up, nobody is expecting it and the installation is half finished. It is the single most common way people get hurt by small wind, which is why the warning is on the front of the machine rather than on page nine of a manual nobody keeps.
A turbine has no off switch. It has a brake, and a brake is something somebody has to remember to use.
What the label on each one is for.
Every unit carries a white label with the TESUP wordmark, a serial number and a QR code. On the two labels you can read clearly in these photographs, every field of the serial is identical except the last, which differs by one: the units came off the line one after another and were labelled in order. That is not a detail we are showing off. It is the whole point of the label.
What a serial buys you is boring and worth having. It says which unit this is, when it was built and in which batch, so a support conversation starts from a fact instead of a description. If a component turns out to be wrong across a production run, the run is identifiable and we can go and find it rather than waiting for complaints to arrive one at a time. None of that is visible on a product page, and all of it is the difference between a two-year warranty that means something and a two-year warranty that means a form.
Behind the pallet, on another pallet: flat sheet-metal blanks. That is the same enclosure, several operations earlier.
Do you need one of these at all?
Sometimes not, and it is cheaper for everyone if we say so here rather than after you have bought one. Our Atlas carries its charge control inside the turbine body, which is why that machine has no separate cabinet to find a wall for and no second cable run to a shed. If an Atlas is what you are installing, the electronics in these photographs are already inside it.
This box is the standalone version: for the larger machines, for installations where the controller needs to live indoors while the turbine does not, and for people adding a TESUP turbine to a system that already exists. There are two ways it goes in the chain — turbine to controller to battery, or turbine to controller to grid inverter — and which one applies to you depends on whether you are storing the energy or using it as it arrives. Tell us which, and we will tell you what you need. If the answer is that you already have it, that is the answer you will get.
What “ready for delivery” honestly means.
It means these particular units are built, labelled, on a pallet and waiting for a pallet truck. It does not mean every order ships tomorrow. Our own product page says it plainly, and we would rather repeat it than have you find it in the small print: depending on stock, delivery runs from as little as one day to as long as four months. A photograph of ten finished controllers is ten finished controllers — it is not a promise about your order date.
What it does tell you is the thing a rendered product image never can. These were made, in a building, by people, on equipment that leaves marks on the floor. The pallet is scuffed, the stacker is scratched, the sheet metal for the next batch is stacked behind them. Every manufacturer’s catalogue photograph looks the same. The floor is where they differ.
Ten to a pallet. Count them.
On the forks, about to become somebody’s delivery.
Ten identical boxes with ten different serial numbers.
That is what a batch is, and it is the only claim on this page you can check by looking.
The photographs on this page are unretouched and unstaged, taken in our own workshop. The 15 kW power-management figure, the 24 to 48 V battery range, the compatibility with all TESUP turbine models, the automatic protection and manual brake, the IoT monitoring, the two-year TESUP Care warranty and the one-day-to-four-month delivery range are all our own published figures from the product page linked above. The serial numbers visible in the photographs belong to these units and to no customer; the units were photographed as stock, before allocation to any order. The QR codes on the labels are not machine-readable at the resolution published here. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page.