[RE-wrenches] Battery Connection Voltage Drop?

[R Ray Walters]

I forgot to mention that an infared camera is a great way to find poor connections.
Its a proven method  on commercial panels, and I think it would work great for battery cabling too.
Just put the system under full load for a few minutes, and the hot connections would show up quick.
(of course just pulling them all off, cleaning them, and checking them by hand has always worked....)

R. Walters
ray at solarray.com
Solar Engineer




On Jan 7, 2011, at 10:01 AM, <dan at foxfire-energy.com> <dan at foxfire-energy.com> wrote:

> 
> Hey Everyone... got another one of those "Funny Questions" I'm struggling with... Seems I have an off grid customer researching battery issues.. and trying to gather a consensus among vendors.. fair enough... currently they have  4 strings of 5+ yr old L16 (not my design) that are starting to fail (no surprises there).. I'm trying to get them into a one or two string design..  Seems they've been in contact with a "Battery Specialist" (who previously sold them a couple dozen or so desulphators... which has not appeared to have significantly affected the lifespan of the bank).. Seems he also "Discovered" that they would need new cables because he measured up to 2/100 of a volt drop across some of the connections -- some at the terminal / flag connections... others from the swedged terminal to the cable... seems he also outright failed a couple of 16" chunks of  2/0 interconnection cables because of "voltage drops" in the cables themselves... I've checked around a little.. I'm told BMI suggests a max .2 volt drop under full load between battery and starter terminal, and 1.2 Volt drop thru the entire starter control circuit... I'm at a loss here folks...  working on my diplomacy..  I'm curious if anyone has hard and fast experience with using voltage drop to evaluate battery interconnections.. and if so, what might the voltage drops be... thanks all.. db 
> 
> Dan Brown
> Foxfire Energy Corp.
> Renewable Energy Systems
> (802)-483-2564
> www.Foxfire-Energy.com
> NABCEP #092907-44
> 
> _______________________________________________
> List sponsored by Home Power magazine
> 
> List Address: RE-wrenches at lists.re-wrenches.org
> 
> Options & settings:
> http://lists.re-wrenches.org/options.cgi/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org
> 
> List-Archive: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/pipermail/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org
> 
> List rules & etiquette:
> www.re-wrenches.org/etiquette.htm
> 
> Check out participant bios:
> www.members.re-wrenches.org
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.re-wrenches.org/pipermail/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org/attachments/20110107/73509f67/attachment-0004.html>