Excessive voltage drop... time to deal with it

[richard5933]

Originally Posted by LeisurePursuits

Upgrade your charging system. Running you generator for 4 hours is way too long. Likely it is charging at a very slow rate.

Four hours is not that long - we have a 780 Ah battery bank which charges via a 70-amp charger. First few hours go quite quickly during first stage, but it can take 12 hours for a completely full charge as the charger reduces output during the second and third stage. If the charger and battery bank is sized appropriately, I would imagine that most systems would do similarly - quickly for first stage and then hours for the second & third stages.

[LeisurePursuits]

Apple's and oranges. OP has a pair of 6 volt batteries, so maybe 225 amp hours. He is using the OEM converter which is surely underpowered for his battery. Upgrading it to a real 50 amp 4 stage charger would reduce the charge time by a lot.

ETA - It is true that it takes a while to top off a lead acid battery to 100%. A good practice is to charge to 70-80% fairly quickly with a generator and then let solar finish it off.

[richard5933]

Originally Posted by LeisurePursuits

Apple's and oranges. OP has a pair of 6 volt batteries, so maybe 225 amp hours. He is using the OEM converter which is surely underpowered for his battery. Upgrading it to a real 50 amp 4 stage charger would reduce the charge time by a lot.

ETA - It is true that it takes a while to top off a lead acid battery to 100%. A good practice is to charge to 70-80% fairly quickly with a generator and then let solar finish it off.

Not really. I charge at the recommended rate of approximately 10% total capacity. In my post I mentioned having the charger and battery bank sized appropriately. If the OP charges his battery bank at 10% of capacity (about 20 amps in this case) he will have the exact same time frame. A few hours to bring things up through stage one, and then many hours to finish the charge to 100%.

Your earlier post said that 4 hours was excessive. Unless one is using lithium batteries, 4 hours is going to only take most modern chargers a little past stage 1 and will leave many hours to go.

I agree though, a good solar system should be able to continue the charge once the initial stage is completed with the generator or shore power.

[RustyDave]

I’m happy to report that a full weekend of camping went by with no hook ups and no low voltage alarms. Resting voltage never dropped below 12.6v over the 3 days. I did have 80w of solar I started experimenting with. That’s for another topic.

[Bigbird65]

Congratulations RustyDave.