Wednesday, April 25, 2012

BATTERY INVESTIGATION PART 7: Much better balance

Well, it's been another two weeks since I was on board looking at the issue with the last battery in the string. When I last was on the boat I had charged up the bank fully and removed the Paktraker battery monitor which had been taking it's power from the suspect low battery. So for two weeks only the solar panels had been keeping the bank topped up and there were no parasitic loads off of any individual battery. When I powered up the Dual Pro PS4 battery charger this is what happened:



As you can see within a few seconds all four batteries immediately jumped up into the 90 to 100% range. This seems to indicate that all the batteries are pretty close in balance to one another.  It certainly is much improved situation  from the last time I fired up the charger which you can see here:



This time after an hour of charging all the batteries were fully charged within seconds of each other. The bank has come along way since I first discovered that the low battery in the bank was not able to accept a full charge.   I'm glad I took the time to investigate the reason for that battery's failure to charge fully. It seems to be related to the Paktraker's parasitic load off the suspect battery. Since I removed it from the battery there has been much improvement. The suspect battery has gradually over several weeks has come to be comparable charge wise to the other batteries in the bank. Now it is on par with the other three batteries in terms of charging.  The only thing left to do is to do one final charge and let the bank rest and then load test each battery.  I'll be doing that very shortly.

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