Car cranking batteries are not designed for cycling, and
will perform very poorly and fail early if used for this purpose, this is a fact, it’s
the old horses for courses and oils ain’t oils.
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 for
many years.
Standard car and truck alternators are designed for
various reasons to recharge car batteries to 70-80%, and this works very well,
until it comes to charging storage batteries where you need as much capacity as possible,
also batteries can take 8-12 hours of continuous engine running to achieve this 70-80%
charge.
Automotive battery chargers suffer from the same less
than perfect regulation as car alternators, and achieve much the same results, for a full
and deep charge, 3 stage smart chargers are required, a quality 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%!
Gas/electric fridges that are run on 12 volt draw a
minimum of 10 amps, some up to 18 amps, in most cases the wiring fitted is far below what
is required, 7.91 mm² (8 B&S) minimum cable 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 to use a smart charger connected to
the 240 volt outlet.
If your main need for a generator is for keeping
batteries charged, a much faster and more economical way is to use one of the Honda 4
stroke petrol 12 volt battery charges available, for their out-put they work out much
cheaper than the equivalent 240 volt charger alone.
Voltage measurement alone on an un-rested battery gives
no real useful indication as to it’s true state of charge, purpose designed Battery
Monitors are the only way to 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, so that at anytime 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.
When running a 12 volt compressor fridge, up to a 1/3
power saving can be achieved by running your fridge temperature at 4.5 degrees instead of
closer to 0.0 degrees temperature, in battery terms that’s a huge saving.
Val Rigoli
Fridge & Solar
Internet
orders welcome
we freight all our products Australia wide
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