- Car
cranking batteries are not
designed
for cycling, they are designed for CRANKING, and will perform very
poorly and fail early if used for deep cycling purposes, this is a fact, would you buy
a Mack truck to
go shopping in, or how about Mini to tow a 30 ton load, different
animals for different jobs :-)
- On
the other hand deep
cycle batteries are
designed
for cycling, but should
not
be cycled below 50% of their
capacity if you want them to last!
- Standard
car and truck
alternators are
designed for various reasons to only recharge car
batteries to 70-80%, and this normally works reasonably well, until it
comes to
charging our deep cycle storage batteries, so just when you need as
much capacity as possible, as quickly as possible, it can take 8-12
hours of continuous engine running to
achieve just this lowly 70-80% charge, and this is with very good
cabling, so much worse with the regular poor wiring often found. Please
check out my >>Dual
Battery Systems article (click here)<< article for
more info on this.
- Automotive
battery chargers
suffer from
the same less than perfect regulation as car alternators, and achieve
much the same results, so for a full and deep charge, 3 stage smart
chargers are required (>>smart
charger article here<<), a quality properly sized solar system
will also give a
full and
deep charge.
- Auxiliary
batteries that
are mounted
some distance away from the main battery (like in a caravan), must have
very heavy connecting cable (minimum 13.5 mm² 6 B&S),
or you will achieve much less than 70% charge, often less than 50%! ...
It's a resistance over distance thing, the further the
electrical
current has to travel, the larger the cable/must be, or the voltage
drops to an unacceptable level (>>article
on wire and cabling here<<).
- Gas/electric
fridges when
run on 12
volt draw a minimum of 10 amps, some up to 23 amps, in most
cases the
wiring fitted is far below what is required (voltage drop problem),
7.91 mm² (8
B&S) minimum cable size must
be used here please, and extra few dollars spent here just the once
will save you a whole
heap of grief later I promise! (>>Article
on Gas Fridge 12V Power Problems Fixed! here<<)
- Almost
all of the 240 volt generators supplied in Australia are very
slow and inefficient when it come to charging batteries via their 12
volt circuits, if using a generator it is much better and faster to use
a smart charger of a reasonable size, connected to the 240 volt outlet (>>article
generator
charging here<<).
- Voltage
measurement alone
on an
un-rested battery gives you no real useful indication as to
it’s
true state of charge, purpose designed Battery Monitors are the only
way to really know for sure how much charge you have left in your
in-service
batteries...
Simply put they measure and tally up all
current both drawn from, and replenished to the battery from all
sources, so that at
any time you can see on the display what you have left in your
batteries, they give a multitude of other useful information too.......... That was the simple
explanation, in
reality the calculations these monitors
do are far more complex, but
the bottom line is accurate
readings and information
about the state of
charge of your batteries that you can trust (>>article
on Battery
Monitoring here<<)
- When
running a 12 volt
compressor
fridge, up to a 1/3 power saving can be achieved by running your fridge
temperature at closer to 4.0 degrees in the fridge area instead of
closer to 0.0 degrees
temperature, in battery terms that’s a huge saving, trying to
keep the beer extra icy cold will really chew through the batteries, of
course if you do have heaps of spare power, then by all means crank the
fridge up, or down I guess it is ;-)
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© Val
Rigoli
mrval.net
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