Remember that little ditty I posted years ago about the Lockheed Advanced Projects Development Dept? It's also known as the skunk works. PhD city. A vendor I contracted to was pulling his hair out. The excellent quality Ramcar 29-plate 8-D batteries that gave hundreds of his customers satisfactory service were failing after 12-16 months at the skunk works.
I investigated. An Alpha Type PhDee had come up with a maintenance charging system that utilized a concept very similar to what this harebrained gizmo is supposed to do. The 16, 8-D batteries were on standby for uninterruptible power supply duty. Instead of using constant voltage float, the razor-brain decided to use cycle charging. When the batteries charge degraded to 12.60 volts, the home brew charger would trip and restore the batteries to 14.0 volts for GUESS WHAT? ONE HOUR! then decouple.
The Alpha argued his fool head off. I had to go to senior project management to over ride his refusal. There were no fools there. I told them I would install a kWh meter on the floated batteries for around a month, then substitute a 75 ampere BW Magnatek ferroresonant charger with an inline Schottky rectifier that would limit final voltage to 13.45 or so. It took two months. The cycling maintenance demanded almost 40% more kWh energy than constant voltage. The cycling was killing the plates. My pleas for them to change to L16's fell on deaf ears because the dumb bells had allocated specific space and battery platforms. The vendors entire sales to Lockheed were at stake not just at the battery charger design knothead farm. A six figure annual sales value.
Three years later I returned and tested all 1,400 CCA 8-D's by hydrometer and by carbon pile load test. One year and some months to failure to 36 months and 16 out of 16 identical batteries tested excellent / as new. Outages there were extremely uncommon. I was not permitted access to whatever load duty the batteries were assigned to.
Lifting the lids, the failures had 100% plate shed failure either by depletion of active material or filling shorts in the sediment chambers. Mark Daugherty president of Ramcar battery gave me a thank you in the form of a thin stack of banknotes. The vendor paid me $3,000.00 Daugherty was campaigning for inclusion of plate envelope separators and this finding sealed the deal for him.
About four months later Lockheed approached me to equip a single new Chevrolet pickup truck that had to have one alternator delivering both 12 and 24 volt voltages. 50 amperes at 28 volts at enhanced idle. It was a runway chase truck that I was forbidden in writing to even discuss. A list of specifications was presented, I formulated a plan, talked it over with Lisle Bruny of Sure Power, then proceeded to custom wind a 2800JA Leece-Neville alternator. It was designed to be eventually removed leaving 0.0% sign any alteration of the C350 vehicle had ever been done. Original brackets and original wiring.
So when I see some hare-brain idea like this announced as some form of "breakthrough" it makes me fume. It's a sucker trap. if an individual is made aware of that fact but decides to elect inclusion into their battery management system all I can say is "It's A Free Country"
I am done with the subject.
