Wet Cell Batteries

[rfoster]

Truk4U: Do you think if would be fair to say that if A1 was to trade or sell his Liberty say for brand X and in doing so lost the hum of the inverters beneath his bed, that he would have to count sheep to sleep? Or is that what you said?

Do you know where he can get some sheep?

[Jon Wehrenberg]

What kind of cheap inverters are you guys running?

Mine are silent.

Jim C....it can be told now. The King traded in his old coach because the inverters under his bed were making too much noise.

[truk4u]

King,

The hum of the inverters and the soothing sound of the Lennon Sisters must do the trick, but I think a herd of sheep are in his future! Poor Di....

[Jon Wehrenberg]

It's the sheep that are going to have the problem. Wool makes me itch.

[JIM CHALOUPKA]

I'm in the Jamestown library catching up on this banter.

I don't yet know about the humming. It usually come from those that don't know the words.

Anyway I sleep at night I don't listen to humming.

If you want humming get some sheep, they make a similar sound.

[Jon Wehrenberg]

You still set to pick up the coach this weekend? Jim?

If it breaks down on the way back call Roger. He will tell you which switch is the burglar alarm and will shut down the coach. Not kidding.

[garyde]

Jon is correct on the idea of increasing inverter sizes. The only purpose in increasing wattage is to add load. The way these Coaches are designed, it is not an easy task and would compromise the design of the system as a whole. If the goal is to purchase a inverter with a better sign wave, then you should replace at the same or similar wattage. This may give you cleaner power, but its still going to be subject to spikes if your a/c units run off of the inverters as well as air compressors, water pumps, etc. unless they are isolated with surge protectors.

[dale farley]

Just a comparison between old (3 years) and new batteries. As a reminder, I had two bad batteries out of my six house batteries. After doing a load test (with a load-based battery tester) I determined the 4 old batteries were in excellent condition. On a 10 second test, they showed just as good as the 2 new batteries.

After replacing two of the six, I turned on the refrigerator and lights and disconnected the AC power. After 9 hours, the batteries were a little less than 50%. I got the same results two times.

I decided to change all 6 batteries so the charging would be equalized on all of them. After changing all 6 batteries, I once again ran the refrigerator and lights, and after 16 hours, the batteries were still at 70%. This was a very significant improvement.

The lesson for me in this is that even though the batteries were still "good", as could be expected, they had lost a significant portion of their load-carrying capacity. Another reason not to replace "some" of a bank of batteries without replacing "all" of them.

[Jon Wehrenberg]

Just because batteries test good does not mean they retain the capacity you originally had.

It is possible if each of the old batteries was given an equalization charge of about 15.5 volts for about 8 hours they might have come back to near the new battery level of performance, but all the technical writing about batteries makes it clear that mixing old and new is going to create problems.

Excellent post Dale because reading about something is no where near as valuable as having an actual test to verify what is said.

[Joe Cannarozzi]

I agree that was a way huge difference in preformance.

You had to be smiling