E-meter [RE-wrenches] & Battery VooDoo

[Travis Creswell]

John,

My two cents.

Some manufacturers claim that is takes several cycles to get the batteries
up to full capacity.  Maybe you haven't broke them in yet?

Are you compensating the spec. gravity reading for temp?

Using voltage is for SOC is hard the hard way to do it.  You can only use it
if the batteries have not been charged or discharged for at least several
hours.

What about equalizing the batteries?

What is the history of these batteries before you got them?

My experience with 6 volt flooded batteries is that the voltage really drops
off under load.

You probably have already thought of all of this.

Travis Creswell
----------
>From: cvsolar at aol.com
>To: RE-wrenches at topica.com
>Subject: E-meter [RE-wrenches]
>Date: Mon, May 1, 2000, 9:55 PM
>

>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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