Sunday, February 26, 2012

BATTERY INVESTIGATION PART FOUR: USING THE CENTECH BATTERY ANALYZER

So another unseasonably warm winters day has me back on board looking at the fourth battery in the electric propulsion system. I bought with me again the Centech Battery Analyzer.  It's really easy to use but, in the previous test I did not have the cold cranking amp spec for the 8A4D battery entered into the Centech tester. So I decide to redo the test since it's pretty easy to do. Here is the video:



As you can seen the results are pretty much the same that I experienced earlier which I noted in a previous post. The battery tested OK. I also bought along a load tester and hooked it up to the battery. It also confirmed that they battery had over 1100 cold cranking amps available.  I then hooked up an external 15 amp charger to the suspect battery and it too like the Dual Pro charger said the battery was bad and failed to charge it completely.  So it's a dilemma to me how bad the battery really is and what to believe as far as testing vs chargers. I am suspecting that having the Paktrakr battery monitor connected over the winter has sulfated the battery a bit. Then adding the optional data collecting cable added an additional load which sulfated it more. Enough so that it has a problem charging. In attempting to measure the additional current load with my digital volt meter I accidentally blew the internal fuse on it. So I'm not exactly sure how much the data cable additional draw is. So for now I have disconnected the Paktrakr from the battery and have the solar panels charging the the bank. I will see how things look the next time. I have an idea on how I may remove the sulfated material off the battery grids but, I will need to rearrange some of the battery cables and need to order some 2 AWG crimp connectors to make some jumper cables first.

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