Electroquest 30 Amp Charger difficulties - Maximum Battery Bank Size?

[bizzard]

4 minutes ago, system 4-50 said:

but they were only fighting one horsepower, you'd have thought they could cope without.

They wanted to burn it, but their Boatman stoves had gone out over night and they didn't have a loit.

[system 4-50]

1 minute ago, bizzard said:

They wanted to burn it, but their Boatman stoves had gone out over night and they didn't have a loit.

Have you got a loit, Buoy?

[bizzard]

1 minute ago, system 4-50 said:

Have you got a loit, Buoy?

Like the French the Greeks smoke rotten fags, dried Donkey dung which won't stay aloit.

[MtB]

25 minutes ago, WotEver said:

It’s you, your shit batteries, your poor care of those batteries, your inability to read a manual and... two faulty SmartGauges

 

I've corrected the error in your post for you

[MtB]

3 hours ago, Old Son said:

But you do have your little rants so sometimes it is difficult to take you seriously. The last major rant was your Boatman Stove. If you compared it with a stove of similar size then fair enough but because YOU could not get it to stay in all night the stove was rubbish. Others on here have them and can keep the stove alight all night so don't really understand where you are coming from. There are lots of people with SG's and not very many have had the issues you have had! Maybe you are just unlucky?

 

I think you're being grossly infair here. My review of the Boatmans stove is all fact-based, including forgiving it its shortcomings as it is half the price of most of its competitors. Nowhere did I say it is "rubbish". That may be your opinion but it is not what I said about it in my review. 

And besides I CAN keep it in all night. What I actually said was I can't keep it in for 24 hours like I could my Squirrel. 

[WotEver]

32 minutes ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

I've corrected the error in your post for you

Gracias

[Richard10002]

6 hours ago, rusty69 said:

Why wouldn't they read the manual, particularly on an important subject such as batteries. 

I agree with Mike that it is helpful to point out that some Smartgauges may not be properly calibrated and hence misleading. In such cases they should be considered faulty and returned, as you would any other faulty goods. 

 

If people always read manuals from cover to cover the common used acronym "RTFM" would never have come into being.

Thus, "de facto", it is extremely common for people to not read manuals. Even if they read enough of a manual to get something going, it is more likely that something on page 30 will be missed, than something earlier.

IIRC I didn't read the whole of the manual when I fitted the gauge. It didn't really matter for me as I already had a NASA BM2, and was well used to monitoring for tail current at 1 or 2% of capacity.

[GUMPY]

Its interesting that those that say SG is shit the loudest have solar, my experience with solar and SG this summer suggests you have to think about how you use SG. It doesn't matter if SG is not in calibration since you should be looking for trends rather than absolute readings. I don't expect many read their SG when it was dark and there has been a 5-10% discharge since the solar stopped charging as that's the time SG reads sensible figures. I noticed with mine,which is in calibration, that when solar was on readings were meaningless however after 8hrs of darkness,yes I get up early, readings showed a descending trend over a couple of cloudy days  even with 400w of solar.  Since there is no gauge made that will tell you when a battery is fully charged when being charged by solar, you can't even use tail current as the solar output may be below the tail current figure  my suspicion is that far from it being a SG problem its more likely to be a crap charging regieme caused by cloudy days.....

 

 

Edited November 2, 2017 by Loddon

[WotEver]

4 minutes ago, Loddon said:

my suspicion is that far from it being a SG problem its more likely to be a crap charging regieme caused by cloudy days.....

There, I’ve fixed that for you

[rusty69]

3 hours ago, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

I think you're being grossly infair here. My review of the Boatmans stove is all fact-based, including forgiving it its shortcomings as it is half the price of most of its competitors. Nowhere did I say it is "rubbish". That may be your opinion but it is not what I said about it in my review. 

And besides I CAN keep it in all night. What I actually said was I can't keep it in for 24 hours like I could my Squirrel. 

Did you read the manual from cover to cover? 

[MtB]

17 minutes ago, rusty69 said:

Did you read the manual from cover to cover? 

 

What manual? Do they come with a manual?

[nicknorman]

I’ve been meaning to keep an eye on when our Smartgauge gets to 100% on charge, but keep forgetting. However I’ve remembered today!

we started at 71% on Smartgauge, 70% on Mastershunt this morning. 

Now got to 99% on Smartgauge, 97% on Mastershunt. Tail current is 9.4A at 14.45v (battery temperature 23C) which is ~2% of the 450AH capacity. I’m watching it...

Oh, it’s just flipped to 100% on the SG with tail current of 8.7A, which is ~1.9%. What a lot of people would call fully charged, although as we know in a couple of hours time the tail current will be below 1%.

So my point is that whilst the SG is not particularly good during charge, and has a quoted accuracy of only 10%, that is the maximum error, not the normal error. I do find it explores the boundaries of 10% mid-charge, but seems to hit 100% at a fairly similar time to the Mastershunt and in accordance with many peoples’ definition of fully charged.

[smileypete]

Out of interest, at what point does tail current fall by less than a third compared to an hour ago?

I expect when tail current falls by a lowish fraction over an hour, then it can be considered stable, and the battery is fully charged.

(My definition of tail current would be the charge current of a reasonably healthy battery, at the correct absorbtion voltage)

Edited November 5, 2017 by smileypete

[nicknorman]

3 minutes ago, smileypete said:

Out of interest, at what point does tail current fall by less than a third compared to an hour ago?

I expect when tail current falls by a lowish fraction over an hour, then it can be considered stable, and the battery is fully charged.

(My definition of tail current would be the charge current at the correct absorbtion voltage)

First bit, don’t know, I’d have to measure it. We’ve stopped for lunch now so when we restart the batteries will initially take a lot of current to put back the surface charge, so not representative of a prolonged charge.

Second bit, whilst that’s a pragmatic definition of fully charged, another hour further on will see the tail current decrease slightly further, as a result of a small amount of mobile lead sulphate being converted back to lead and acid, and consequently the battery was not quite fully charged an hour before.

[smileypete]

30 minutes ago, nicknorman said:

Second bit, whilst that’s a pragmatic definition of fully charged, another hour further on will see the tail current decrease slightly further, as a result of a small amount of mobile lead sulphate being converted back to lead and acid, and consequently the battery was not quite fully charged an hour before.

Sure, that's exactly what we're looking for.

You could also say 'fully charged' includes an acceptably tiny amount of cumulative capacity loss, with some batt types requiring occasional routine equalisation to reverse this.

I expect that when tail current falls by a small fraction for a healthy battery, this means a greater proportion of that is causing gassing and not returning charge to the battery.

Edited November 5, 2017 by smileypete

[nicknorman]

20 minutes ago, smileypete said:

Sure, that's exactly what we're looking for.

You could also say 'fully charged' includes an acceptably tiny amount of cumulative capacity loss, with some batt types requiring occasional routine equalisation to reverse this.

I expect that when tail current falls by a small fraction for a healthy battery, this means a greater proportion of that is causing gassing and not returning charge to the battery.

But the nub of the problem is that whilst we both accept that it’s neither feasible nor necessary to reach absolutely fully charged, we could take different views on exactly where we set the compromise.

You say “where the tail current falls by a lowish fraction...” so you haven’t even specified your compromise value, let alone agreed it with everyone else!

as I’ve said before, if you are trying to make a gauge that reads 100% when the batteries are fully charged, it can never be particulary accurate since there is no consensus about exactly what 100% charged means!

Edited November 5, 2017 by nicknorman

[smileypete]

41 minutes ago, nicknorman said:

But the nub of the problem is that whilst we both accept that it’s neither feasible nor necessary to reach absolutely fully charged, we could take different views on exactly where we set the compromise.

You say “where the tail current falls by a lowish fraction...” so you haven’t even specified your compromise value, let alone agreed it with everyone else!

as I’ve said before, if you are trying to make a gauge that reads 100% when the batteries are fully charged, it can never be particulary accurate since there is no consensus about exactly what 100% charged means!

Mentioned it in post 138, 'a third over one hour', (for a healthy battery, correct charge voltage of course).

My concensus would be with what The Battery FAQ states, only quibble there is it doesn't exactly define what 'stable' is.

So does 'a third over one hour' get close enough to a final tail current reading over say 12 hours or 24 hours?

Edited November 5, 2017 by smileypete

[WotEver]

1 hour ago, smileypete said:

So does 'a third over one hour' get close enough to a final tail current reading over say 12 hours or 24 hours?

Not really. If a 220Ah bank has dropped from 6A to 4A over an hour it meets your definition of ‘a third’ but it’s still at 2%. Perhaps you might consider 2% to be fully charged, many folk do. I’d like to wait another hour and see what it’s done. If it’s only dropped to say 3A then I’d probably call that ‘charged enough’. So in a nutshell what I think I’m saying is that a third is too coarse. 

[ditchcrawler]

On 02/11/2017 at 14:25, Mike the Boilerman said:

 

What manual? Do they come with a manual?

Correct, so can they legally be fitted on a new boat and comply with the RCD ?

[smileypete]

58 minutes ago, WotEver said:

Not really. If a 220Ah bank has dropped from 6A to 4A over an hour it meets your definition of ‘a third’ but it’s still at 2%. Perhaps you might consider 2% to be fully charged, many folk do. I’d like to wait another hour and see what it’s done. If it’s only dropped to say 3A then I’d probably call that ‘charged enough’. So in a nutshell what I think I’m saying is that a third is too coarse. 

I  had a look at Nicks data from a while back:

Looks like in Nicks case that happens with a tail current of 4A on a 440Ah (IIRC) bank of Trojans, so well below 2%.

Sure if real world data points to a lower fraction, use that instead.

My gut feel is that it may be a little to early for traction batts, but since these need periodic EQ anyway it's not such a big deal.

And if it happens too early on, then that may well point to sulphating batts. If so then it's a very useful indicator.

Just to repeat, were not looking for perfection here, just a tradeoff in the form of acceptably tiny cumulative capacity loss.

Edited November 5, 2017 by smileypete

[WotEver]

3 hours ago, smileypete said:

Looks like in Nicks case that happens with a tail current of 4A on a 440Ah (IIRC) bank of Trojans, so well below 2%.

It would be just as simple to say that he’s down to <1% so he’s 99.9% charged. No point watching it for another hour, or indeed keep the engine running and using fuel for that hour. 

[smileypete]

45 minutes ago, WotEver said:

It would be just as simple to say that he’s down to <1% so he’s 99.9% charged. No point watching it for another hour, or indeed keep the engine running and using fuel for that hour. 

In Nicks individual case, yes.

But the final tail current may vary between 3% and 0.3% depending on batt type and condition, so saying 1% is sufficient won't work for everybody.

I guess you could say up to around 1% for new batteries - gotta baby 'em! or sealed batteries - which don't gas much, or around 2% for well worn non-sealed batts - which will buble like a witches cauldron, IF they last long enough.

That'll do me.

Edited November 5, 2017 by smileypete

[nicknorman]

25 minutes ago, smileypete said:

In Nicks individual case, yes.

But the final tail current may vary between 3% and 0.3% depending on batt type and condition, so saying 1% is sufficient won't work for everybody.

I guess you could say up to around 1% for new batteries - gotta baby 'em! or sealed batteries - which don't gas much, or around 2% for well worn non-sealed batts - which will buble like a witches cauldron, IF they last long enough.

That'll do me.

I’d say that any battery that had a final tail current of 3% is totally knackered and thus it doesn’t matter what you do with it! Even 2% which would be 9A for me seems a lot.

[smileypete]

1 hour ago, nicknorman said:

I’d say that any battery that had a final tail current of 3% is totally knackered and thus it doesn’t matter what you do with it! Even 2% which would be 9A for me seems a lot.

Me too possibly but it doesn't invalidate the point to Tony that a fixed level of 1% may not cover all situations well enough.

Edited November 6, 2017 by smileypete

[MtB]

On 05/11/2017 at 22:35, nicknorman said:

I’d say that any battery that had a final tail current of 3% is totally knackered and thus it doesn’t matter what you do with it! Even 2% which would be 9A for me seems a lot.

3% of what though? 3% of its badge capacity or 3% of its much reduced actual?