Instead of blurbs and excerpts, I'll go into detail on the AGM charging matter.
- It's a lot easier to equalize a flooded battery correctly than it is to correctly CONDITION an absorbed glass mat battery
- BOTH types of battery have absolutely no available device you can purchase to do the job correctly without modification
- Batteries that are fully cycled like BFL13's are much more sensitive than a weekend warrior's
- A thousand hours connected to a power pole manages to restore some of the ampere-hour shortage caused by pretend chargers
- So my advice is almost always directed at AGMS that see generator charging or heavy cycling for longer than a week
- Permanent loss of capacity may be restored by conditioning which only can be corrected by following Lifeline's conditioning instructions to the letter
- No pretend charger can even approach this
- Recharging a slightly cycled AGM with 100 hours of light cycling followed by a thousand hours of power pole charging is a world apart from a regimen of 50% discharging followed by attempting to recover by running a generator (2nd attempt at trying to explain this)
- The more deep the discharge on ANY battery the more strict the 100% recovery becomes
- A simple fix for a smart chargers major malfuntion would be to push a button and automatically initiate a four hour 14.40 voltage limited charge
- The four hour charge would be very useful for wet battery recovery but California has legislated that this feature would be unlawful. Do you see any smart charger with this feature?
- No way
- Does the battery care what you think or California legislates?
- No
- It must follow the rules of chemistry and die an unnaturally early death
- A 20% lack of battery capacity is almost impossible to confirm by guesswork
- Your generator run time knows
- If you don't mind paying for a 100 amp-hour battery and hauling around a 75 amp hour battery neither do I
- It's when an AGM battery loses 35% or greater that most people realize something is not right
- Only a full recovery conditioning can attempt to restore -some- of the lost capacity
- This is not a disadvantage verus a wet battery which continues to sulfate
- My nine-year old -lightly used- Lifeline battery was just measured ending Saturday
- It retains 94% capacity
- This is not phenomenal
- A heavily cycled Lifeline would do the same after a thousand 50% cycles
- Now stop and figure out your days of average vacation divided into one thousand
- All due to the fact that the battery was not refilled to 100% EVER
None of this is important to people who don't mind purchasing new batteries every three years. In my case, eight hundred dollars means something to me -- a month's worth of pension needlessly lost.
And again I mention the difference between how hard you use a battery and the length of time it is subject to the abuse. And this is qualified by the amount percentage of undercharging and length of time spent undercharged.
People who scorn advice are the first to yell about how 200 amp hours runs out in the middle of the night.
Shortages are correctable but the correction is not automatically resolved by any converter. The most one can discover is the least offensive to rectify.
