equalizer your house batteries

[truk4u]

Jack,

I discussed equalizing with Lifeline and their take was to go ahead and give it a try, you might gain a little more service time, but usually you will be buying new batteries. I equalized the Deka's in my Liberty, they were only 3 years old. I had a little better performance for a very short period of time, about 3 weeks while we were using the bus. Bit the bullet and put in new Lifelines and life was good.

PS - Don't use one of these on AGM's, they don't work, lead acid wet only!

Tester..jpg

[Jon Wehrenberg]

What is "one of these"? Do you mean a carbon pile tester or all testers?

[truk4u]

Beats the hell out me, it's a Actron Battery Load Tester sold at NAPA. I thought piles were a personal problem with you.

[Jon Wehrenberg]

Obviously you need to go back to herding sheep.

If you are going to post stuff at least know what you are doing. Let me rephrase the question so maybe even you will understand it.

You show a battery tester, but are you suggesting no battery tester of any technology will work on an AGM or just the type shown. In other words, did your information source point specifically at the type shown, or was the statement intended to cover all AGM batteries regardless of tester used?

Somebody has to keep an eye on your posts to check for completeness and accuracy. I'll volunteer to be your nag.

[truk4u]

Go back out and work on your brake chambers... The one posted does not work on Lifeline AGM's or any other AGM according to the manufacturer who I talked to because my new Load Tester wouldn't do squat!

Even you should be able to understand THAT!

[jack14r]

Truk,My question was about what minimum voltage in your opinion should the gen auto start if there is a good load on the batteries?

[Jon Wehrenberg]

Jack, In the Lifeline literature they don't specify if the voltage is loaded or unloaded. According to the table they consider 12.2 (24.4) as 50% but the table does not stipulate with or without so if I were to guess that would be an unloaded voltage. So to answer your question I guess you could allow the batteries to reach that level unloaded, and then subject them to what you interpret as a "good" load and see what voltage that is, and then use that as a potential recharge point.

The problem with that however is if you are relying on autostart, it doesn't know if that is an unloaded or loaded voltage so it almost forces you to treat that as the set point for autostart regardless of load.

I hope I am not revealing any confidential information, but Rick Thompson (Thompson Coach) shared with me the parameters he programmed into his coaches for the autostart and he made it a point to not use a specific voltage, but a variety of factors including voltage, load on the batteries, rate of discharge, etc. to initiate the autostart. To turn off the generator his parameters took into consideration even more parameters. As you are aware I am not an advocate of autostart and prefer to manually initiate the generator start rather than deeply discharge the batteries. But I can say if I had the set up Thompson has in his software I would definitely let the autostart function as intended.

I think the issue of when to start the generator when using autostart is a complex one and as your question suggests there are a lot of factors that need to be a part of the parameters used to engage autostart.

[truk4u]

Jack,

I don't have much to add to Jon's comments and sounds like your discussion with Lifeline using 11.8 is more in line with what some of the converters use for their autostart voltage. I tried my best to stay with 12.2, but many times it would be at 12.0 in the morning and I sure couldn't tell you whether that would effect the life of the batteries or not.

I suppose you could look at two different ways.. If you don't deep discharge them beyond say 11.8, over the life of the batteries you get a certain number of cycles. If you keep them above 12.2, you use more cycles over the life of the batteries. So, would the fewer cycles at 11.8vs greater cycles at 12.2 result in longer house battery life, who knows! I'm sure someone will jump in here with mathematical formulas using the battery charts to solve this dilemma.

Bottom line, both will probably work just fine...