AGM batteries - are they better?
Upgrade to an AGM battery. You can safely mount them inside, and upside down, and they will out-perform any flooded battery you ever owned! Here's a quote from another thread. It's typical of other...
Forum Discussion
christopherglenn wrote:
I run 3 agm's - ~255 ah with a 150 amp inverter/charger. It charges 150-160 amps at the start of Bulk, dropping to 40-60 amps for Absorption for ~30 minutes, before dropping to float. Absorption to <10 amps in float is less then an hour. The biggest bang is the 150 amps in bulk, with your 80 amp charger, I doubt you will see anything but a lighter wallet. In your case I would out a solar panel or two on the roof for the end of the Absorption stage and call it good.
This is probably good advice. For FLAs, the charge rate is limited by capacity. The bigger the capacity, the more current you can stuff in. A C/20 rate is often recommended and Trojan says C/8 is OK. I go to C/5.75 (briefly C/5.5). The problem is absorption to float range takes a while. I have about the right capacity for my needs - perhaps a bit more than I need, as I don't often get too much below 75-80% if I've gone to the effort to get to 95% the previous day. If I ran 60-80% I'd do fine, but I keep wanting to get the battery back to higher SOCs since it's good for them. Slow top off with solar seems like the best option for me.
