MORE STUFF THAT'S NOT NEEDED

It seems organizing and removing of things on board that have no reason to be on board is never ending. A few days ago while  looking for some information on one of the on board pumps I came upon some manuals for equipment that is no longer on board:

These include the Paloma Water Heater. The old Professional Mariner battery charger and the Racor fuel filter which has not been on board for over eight years. No reason for these to remain on board taking up space. Plus it feels good to get them of the boat and simplify things.

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.

PREVIOUS BATTERY INVESTIGATION POST

BATTERY INVESTIGATION PART 1: ASSAULT ON A BATTERY

As I usually do during the winter I check up on BIANKA almost on a weekly basis. The warm winter this year encourages me to do that even more. So it while I was on board earlier this week I fired up the Dual Pro Four charger to check on how balanced the battery bank was. I notice that the most negative battery in the string was not charging like the other three. It was not getting over 12.9 volts. The next day I went back on board and cleaned the battery and charger contacts and the situation was the same. This is the first issue with the batteries I've had in almost five years since converting to electric propulsion. So I can't complain. Tomorrow I plan to head back down with another external charger and see if it is an issue with the Dual Pro charger or if the battery is really at fault.

FOR BATTERY INVESTIGATION PART TWO CLICK HERE

A QUESTION OF BALANCE

I'm not talking about the Moody Blues album of the same name. Arguably one of the better Moody Blues albums after Days of Future Passed which is in BIANKA'S on board CD collection. 

No, I'm talking about battery balance.

 I noticed over the winter that one of the four batteries in the 48 volt battery bank was lagging a little behind in voltage compared to the other batteries when charging. Not by a lot but, enough that my Paktrakr battery monitor was issuing warnings about overcharging of the other batteries and undercharging of the lagging battery. This is a problem when you have multiple batteries in series  in a say  a 48 volt bank like I do for the electric propulsion system. The one undercharged battery can drag down the others. Because my ZIVAN NG-1 charges the bank as a whole it does not know that one of the batteries is lagging behind it just keeps charging until it's voltage and current parameters are met. How to correct this situation?  I've ordered a DUAL PRO PS-4 battery charger.

This charger unlike the ZIVAN NG-1 has four individual battery chargers built in to it. Each  is connected to the individual batteries in the string. So if one of the battery reaches full charge it stops charging that particular battery. Likewise if one battery takes longer to charge it keeps charging that battery and stops charging the others.  This should help to balance the battery bank or at least prevent overcharging of the batteries that are not lagging. Also having the DUAL PRO on board will provide a backup battery charger and backups are a good thing when cruising.