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Electroquest 30 Amp Charger difficulties - Maximum Battery Bank Size?


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19 minutes ago, smileypete said:

My latest take is that 95% of boaters would be best off with decent brand leisure batts (aka reasonable 'el cheapos'). Why? Because they're not terribly interested in batts, and I can't say I blame them.

Precisely. So they see Multicell and think “Oh, they’re a bit better than the cheapest”. So they buy them. And can’t charge them. 

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2 hours ago, system 4-50 said:

I would like to emphasize for anybody just browsing this thread that to use an SG effectively it is essential to read the supplied installation manual thoroughly from cover to cover. It is very detailed in its description of what it can and can't do and when.

+1

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On 31/10/2017 at 18:57, system 4-50 said:

I would like to emphasize for anybody just browsing this thread that to use an SG effectively it is essential to read the supplied installation manual thoroughly from cover to cover. It is very detailed in its description of what it can and can't do and when.

 

And just to expand on this, some of the things a Smart Gauge can't do that you might be expecting it to, are:

1) Act as a 'fuel gauge' for your batteries.

2) Tell you when they are fully charged

3) Tell you the state of charge whilst being charged

4) Tell you when to stop charging

5) Check itself for calibration

6) Reliably tell you the battery voltage unless you have manually checked the calibration against a reference source. 

 

And for balance, here are the things it can do:

1) Tell you when to start charging.

2) Nothing else.

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A bit unfair, that! ;)

2) , 3) and 4) are really the same thing, and it's not that Smartgauge doesn't do it, it just doesn't do it to great accuracy.

1) (can't) and 1) (can) are mutually exclusive.

Very few instruments/tools actually do 5), (and the ones that do usually have to as they go out of calibration fairly quickly! And the calibration is really an an add-on to the basic instrument)

6) is a quality control problem, and is also true of some VERY expensive  voltmeters. (and all cheap ones)

 

:icecream:

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8 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

And just to expand on this, some of the things a Smart Gauge can't do that you might be expecting it to, are:

1) Act as a 'fuel gauge' for your batteries.

2) Tell you when they are fully charged

3) Tell you the state of charge whilst being charged

4) Tell you when to stop charging

5) Check itself for calibration

6) Reliably tell you the battery voltage unless you have manually checked the calibration against a reference source. 

 

And for balance, here are the things it can do:

1) Tell you when to start charging.

2) Nothing else.

Oh how you love Smartgauge bashing. What sport!

Firstly, one has to bear in mind the popular alternative of having nothing. How many times do we hear of people who have battery problems and say “I don’t understand it, I run my engine for an hour each day until the voltmeter reads well over 12v”?

So while the SG isn’t perfect, it is much, much better than nothing for determining when to start charging AND when to stop charging.

It is a fuel gauge. If you want to fill your car’s fuel tank, do you refuel until the gauge shows full, or do you use some other means of determining full - ie when the pump clicks off? Many cars have gauges that read full with 10 litres or more still to go in.

It does tell you when to stop charging - within a few % - and anyway, exactly when SHOULD one stop charging? Granted using an ammeter for this purpose is more accurate but many people don’t have a high resolution ammeter nor know how to use it nor are even interested.

It does tell you the State of Charge during recharge - to within about 10% which is much better than nothing.

Yes of course it should be properly calibrated at the factory and that it has proven not to be in some cases, is it’s only significant issue.

In your case you wanted a non-standard charging regime that involved leaving the batteries in a low SoC for long periods. You bought cheap shite batteries that were pretending to be something they weren't, and when it all went wrong you seek to blame the Smartgauge. So cruel!

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9 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

And just to expand on this, some of the things a Smart Gauge can't do that you might be expecting it to, are:

1) Act as a 'fuel gauge' for your batteries.

2) Tell you when they are fully charged

3) Tell you the state of charge whilst being charged

4) Tell you when to stop charging

5) Check itself for calibration

6) Reliably tell you the battery voltage unless you have manually checked the calibration against a reference source. 

 

And for balance, here are the things it can do:

1) Tell you when to start charging.

2) Nothing else.

Looking at the text, there is nothing worth discussing. A hysterical, illogical anti-smartgauge  rant will lie behind it.

Edited by rusty69
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On 01/11/2017 at 08:40, rusty69 said:

Looking at the text, there is nothing worth discussing. A hysterical, illogical anti-smartgauge  rant will lie behind it.

 

More like, you know I'm right and you wish to suppress debate as you know I can produce either empirical evidence or quotations from the SmartGauge manual to support every one of my assertions.

Such is the 'groupthink' on here in favour of the SmartGauge, any criticism of the SmartGauge is immediately jumped upon, as just illustrated.

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Just now, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

More like, you know I'm right and you wish to suppress debate as you know I can produce either empirical evidence or quotations from the SmartGauge manual to support every one of my assertions.

Such is the 'groupthink' on here in favour of the SmartGauge, any criticism of the SmartGauge is immediately jumped upon, as just illustrated.

I'll give you a tenner for your useless Smartguages, although suspect you must have binned them months ago as they are so rubbish. 

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On 01/11/2017 at 09:11, rusty69 said:

I'll give you a tenner for your useless Smartguages, although suspect you must have binned them months ago as they are so rubbish. 

 

They are not useless, they tell me when to start charging my batteries as noted in my list above. 

They ARE partly the reason for my brand new expensive battery bank sulphating up though, as they came incorrectly calibrated, meaning I stopped charging too soon, believing the SoC was higher than it actually was.

The way to tell when to stop charging, as the forum now so often says, is to wait for the tail current to stabilise. The SmartGauge does not tell you this. Unless you can explain otherwise. 

I post about my experiences with the SmartGauge periodically just for balance. I was totally taken in by the groupthink on here about how the SmartGauge is the answer to all battery monitoring problems. My experience shows this is not necessarily true. 

Start charging when the SG indicates you're down to 50%, stop charging when it says 100%, is the tempting implication of that nice big red LED display. After all, its a fuel gauge for batteries isn't it? But this is plain wrong if you read the manual properly, you simply cannot do that and expect your batteries to survive.

Edited by Mike the Boilerman
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9 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

And just to expand on this, some of the things a Smart Gauge can't do that you might be expecting it to, are:

1) Act as a 'fuel gauge' for your batteries.

2) Tell you when they are fully charged

3) Tell you the state of charge whilst being charged

4) Tell you when to stop charging

5) Check itself for calibration

6) Reliably tell you the battery voltage unless you have manually checked the calibration against a reference source. 

 

And for balance, here are the things it can do:

1) Tell you when to start charging.

2) Nothing else.

The jury is still out for me on Smartgauge.

Not surprising, as since fitting it circumstances have meant very little boating, and too much time sat on the mooring on a land-line.

Also ditching a high power combi capable of overcharging the batteries, and replacing  with a low power charger where little configuration seems possible has made it unclear how much Smartgauge was  telling the truth with the old charger, and how much it is with the new.

However, if you own two of the devices, each telling a wildly different story, (both of which I think you believe to be incorrect), I fail to understand why you have not returned both to be recalibrated.

As has been said repeatedly, poor calibration of individual samples does not in itself indicate the incompetence of the actual design.

Get them recalibrated, then try again.  You might then be less negative, or maybe you will not, but at least you would be making a fairer comparison to those who do think they are a useful tool.

I have no axe to grind here.  I have always had my doubts if one would be useful to me, but decided to try.  Circumstances so far mean I don't yet know, but because of that I'm not yet declaring it not much use.  That seems far to me!

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7 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

I post about my experiences with the SmartGauge periodically just for balance. I was totally taken in by the groupthink on here about how the SmartGauge is the answer to all battery monitoring problems. My experience shows this is not necessarily true.

But your experiences are based on faulty Smartgauges(according to you) which you appear not to want to rectify 

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On 01/11/2017 at 09:20, alan_fincher said:

However, if you own two of the devices, each telling a wildly different story, (both of which I think you believe to be incorrect), I fail to understand why you have not returned both to be recalibrated.

 

I don't need to send them back. They can be manually calibrated by the user, even though the manual is silent on this point.

The thing is, they don't need to be accurate to tell one start recharging (the only thing they can reliably tell a user). 45%? 50%, 55%? It doesn't really matter much. And during discharge, when one says 80% and the other 66%, the truth is probably about mid way between the two. So they are suitable for their intended use really. 

Besides, it pleases me to have in my possession two inaccurate SmartGauges. If I sent them back for re-calibration all the usual suspects might start calling into question whether they were ever wrong in the first place. Currently, I can produce the evidence to counter the groupthink here that the SmartGauge is perfect in every way!

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1 minute ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

Besides, it pleases me to have in my possession two inaccurate SmartGauges. If I sent them back for re-calibration all the usual suspects might start calling into question whether they were ever wrong in the first place. Currently, I can produce the evidence to counter the groupthink here that the SmartGauge is perfect in every way!

Agreed, it sounds like that is the best reason for you to own them! 

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My little Chinese £3 voltmeter is a beauty, it tells me everthing I need to know. Electric fridges and perverters on all the time upset all the monitoring of batteries, thats why the Smartgauge was invented I suppose in an attempt to rectify this.  Most of the time during the day like for the past 2 hours I have had nothing on at all , except me underpants and slippers, so my little volt meter is telling me the truth, 12.5v in the battery, a cheapo 5 year old one and still good.  I have to go and finish some work off in a mo and I leave nothing on at all, except my dear little gauge while I'm out, the meter will be reading the same when I return. I have a small 200w Switch mode inverter, only used for a bit of telly when I'm on a trip. I don't trust anything with the word SMART in its name. I detest the word SMART. I've known too many Smart Alecs in the motor trade. :closedeyes:

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Oh, look, Mike's on one of his anti-Smartgauge rants again... :rolleyes:

10 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

... here are the things it can do:

1) Tell you when to start charging.

Yes.  That's what it's for.

10 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

some of the things a Smart Gauge can't do that you might be expecting it to, are:

1) Act as a 'fuel gauge' for your batteries.

2) Tell you when they are fully charged

3) Tell you the state of charge whilst being charged

4) Tell you when to stop charging

1) Yes it can.

2) Yes it can (within 10%)

3) Yes it can (within 10%)

4) Yes it can (within 10%)

More to the point, nothing else available gets as close.

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On 01/11/2017 at 10:02, WotEver said:

Oh, look, Mike's on one of his anti-Smartgauge rants again... :rolleyes:

Yes.  That's what it's for.

 

Yes. And all the other uses which people deduce and assume (just as I did), are broadly denied deep in the text of the manual.

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1 minute ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

Yes. And all the other uses which people deduce and assume (just as I did), are broadly denied deep in the text of the manual.

It won't wake you up in the morning with a nice cup of tea either.

I don't believe that's explained in the manual at all...

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On 01/11/2017 at 10:02, WotEver said:

2) Yes it can (within 10%)

 

So when the SG says 100% SoC and the real SoC is 90%.... this is deeply misleading as charging one's batteries to 90% instead of 100% leads to DISASTER... as any fule kno.

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2 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

So when the SG says 100% SoC and the real SoC is 90%.... this is deeply misleading as charging one's batteries to 90% instead of 100% leads to DISASTER... as any fule kno.

So don't do that :)

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