E-meter [RE-wrenches]

cvsolar at aol.com cvsolar at aol.com
Mon May 1 19:55:25 PDT 2000


Hi all, 
   I am doing another experiment at my house (along with the humming DC250) 
to determine the negative aspects of an undersized battery bank.  I have gone 
to manual generator start so I can play with the battery state of charge.  I 
have 4 Trojan L16G batteries in a 24v bank feeding the SW4024.  Loads vary 
from a base of 4 to 8 amps to a peak of 70 to 80 amps.  Charge rate with my 
Yamaha 4600 is set at 60 amps.  Because I have been hitting the batteries 
hard at both ends,  I have noticed a deterioration in the batteries capacity 
(in only 4 weeks of usage) .  I will get down to 80% on the e-meter and 
negative amp hours agree but my battery voltage is way down indicating  less 
than 50% left.  I fiddled with the Peukerts exponent setting and set it to 
1.5 (the maximum) and it didn't seem to make any difference.  Does the 
e-meter just lose it's ability to properly track the battery at high loads?  
Anyone had any experience with this.  I saw a similar problem with one 
installed system with big loads and small battery bank.  

Unfortunately I did not have the e-meter on my old bank of 16 T105's that 
were worn out so I don't know what the indications of a failed battery would 
look like.  These batteries charge to 28.8 without any trouble but they are 
having a fast voltage drop similar to my worn out T105's (though not as bad)  
The negative amp hours on my e-meter seem to be correct based on my loads. 
Battery specific gravity reading indicates batteries are not really fully 
charged after running the generator for two hours at 28.8v  bulk absorption 
charge.  Current drops off normally.    Does this have something to do with 
the HUMMMMM?  I'm confused!

John Blittersdorf
CVSolar
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