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I am thinking of getting a Victron Centaur 60amp 12v charger for a battery bank which has 6no Trojan 6v batteries arranged so that they are producing 12v and have 675AH at 12v. Will my 1Kw gennie be able to handle the loads required to run the charger? I am not entirely sure how to work out the loading....and I could not find this info on Victron website. I have solar power as well but want to make sure that if I get stuck and batteries need topping up, then I can with current generator... Thanks in advance!
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The other night when the batteries were on charge from being fairly low the CO alarm went off and the consensus of experts was that I had a duff cell or battery. A while back I had also smelled the telltale eggy smell too. But we have just tested batteries and got the following readings Batteries charging at 14.06v from engine. Immediately on switching off - starter battery 13.7v, bank of 4 domestics 13.6v Hydrometer testing of all domestic battery cells had them all borderline in the green, tho with one cell in each battery borderline in the white. Nothing dramatically out of line from the others. Two cells on the difficult to access battery were too low to test (doesn't mean they were dry, just not full enough for the hydrometer tube to bend in to the cell and pick up). All cells looked clean - no deposits or blackness. After one hour of all batteries being disconnected and separated - starter read 13.65, the 4 domestics between 13.36 and 13.38 After a second hour of rest - starter read 13.27, 4 domestics all between 12.87 and 12.90. So even if I was worried about those two lower cells, there was no difference in the charge held by that battery and the others. So all seems to be fine and healthy enough to me with my limited knowledge, and all four batteries in my bank are equal. Do these readings look OK to those of you in the know? We have now topped up the two cells which were lower. What I suspect is that I had put the Victron Multi on 'charge only' rather than 'inverter' and this pumps a lot of charge in very fast, which may have been a bit much for the batteries and caused them to gas even though otherwise they are sound. Does this sound likely? It seems strange that a unit could be designed to fast-charge batteries enough to make them potentially dangerous. After the CO alarm incident I unplugged overnight then left myself plugged in for 24 hours on 'inverter' setting with no adverse readings on the CO meter, and no nasty smells. I am therefore hoping we have healthy (enough) happy (enough) batteries and thus can stop my credit card cowering in fear....
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Well, just moved aboard our boat to find the we have a fault with the above unit. Details below:- Background info:- Saturday, week before last we moored in a marina and I connected up the shore power. Turned the Victron over to charge and all was good. Lights on and everything seemed to be working. As I left the boat the fan in the base of the unit kicked in, so left thinking all was fine and the batteries were charging. The next day I get a call from the marina, however I missed it and didn't get in touch until a couple of days later. Apparently there was an alarm going off on the boat so they went and investigated. It turns out that the alarm that was activated was the CO2 one. However, there was no smell. So the batteries for the alarm were removed. Someone looked at the batteries and said they were well past their use by date and it was probably them gassing that caused the alarm. The shore power was disconnected and and the boat locked up. Current status:- Yesterday we moved aboard and I replaced the batteries with some new ones. Checked that we now had a 12v system running again and found it all working as it should. Connected the shore power and found we didn't have any 240v at the sockets. So after testing connections with a multimeter I noticed that nonce of the LEDs were lit on the Victron as they were previously. It didn't make any different if I changed the switch to charge or, with the shore line disconnected, inverter. There wasn't 240v anywhere except for the 240v IN connector on the Victron. Temporary solution was to connect the 240v input and output wires and bypass the unit altogether. My thoughts:- i think something fried in the unit whilst trying to charge the batteries that were knackered. Which is probably what set off the CO2 detector. If anyone has any thoughts or experience on this I'd be pleased to hear them. Since I'm away from the boat for just over a fortnight I'd like to see if there is anything I can test when I return before ripping the unit out and sending it away for repair as a new unit is rather costly and an expense we'd rather not have right now. Thanks, Alan.
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Hi all, Just had a new victron multiplus installed ! Very exciting I am no trying to figure out how to use it !! The inverter seems to work fine, switch on inveter and my 240 works.. great ! The charger I am going to try tomorrow with the Genny but my confusion comes from what settings I use to use the power assist feature. there is a switch on for charger or on for inverter but which one would I use for the Genny/ power assist. I would like to run my washing machine by running my generator (honda eu20i) and using the power assist feature to take any extra load from my batteries. Any one have any experience how I would do this? Thanks for your time. Martin