Re: Multiple lead-acid charging

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:32:19 -0700 (PDT), eromlignod
<eromlignod@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>
>OK, but what kind of charger should I look for?
>
>Multiple parallel batteries would take the same voltages at the same
>point in the charging cycle (if I used a voltage-based charge scheme),
>but I would need a lot more current.
>
>Can I simply get a single charger with a high current output?  Would
>it charge mulitple batteries just as well as a single battery?  Maybe
>something like this:
>
>http://www.powerstream.com/low-noise-high-power.htm
>
>???
>
>Don
>Kansas City

The current rating of the charger depends primarily on how fast you
want to charge the batteries, and on how much energy you have to put
back in them, rather than on the total capacity of the batteries.  

If you will regularly discharge the battery by 100 AH, and have a
couple of days to recharge, then a 10 amp charger will be more than
sufficient.  If, on the other hand, you will need to charge it in a
couple of hours, you'd need a 100 amp charger.

As another poster said, if you have several batteries permanently
connected in parallel (or series-parallel, as you might do to get 12
volts from a group of 6 volt batteries), you can consider the group as
a single large battery.  Personally, for parallelled batteries, I like
to have the possibility to disconnect each parallel branch so I can
easily test if any branch is losing capacity (or to readily remove a
branch if it develops a shorted cell) (I've had a couple of situations
where one of two parallelled batteries failed, and did not notice a
problem til I tried to use the bad battery alone...)




-- 
Peter Bennett, VE7CEI  
peterbb4 (at) interchange.ubc.ca  
GPS and NMEA info: http://vancouver-webpages.com/peter
Vancouver Power Squadron: http://vancouver.powersquadron.ca