Anything new in batteries for solar
I have four 31 size lead acid batteries. They are heavy and you only get to used half their capacity. Is anything come up recently that could be a reasonable replacement--probably lithium?
Forum Discussion
BFL13,
What went wrong for N8GS may be that you always fully recover the battery bank after a trip. Not many folks are as dedicated to that effort as you are.
More likely vibration caused one of the trojans to fail, and the constant charging from solar can "hide" the problem until there is a large load. So the other three "good" jars fell on their swords trying to charge that one bad cell. It was not a catastrophic failure.
That happened to me with my bank of 3 twelve volts. I was at a campground and the Magnum inverter one morning was pouring 64 amps of charge into the banks. I separated them--the bank of four was still functional, but the bank of three within a few moments of being disconnected started producing H2S gas. It drove me and a guest out of the RV in about ten minutes. Fortunately there were no other campers in the sites on either side of us.
I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and called a mobile RV repair person who disconnected and took away all of the bank of three.
What went wrong for N8GS may be that you always fully recover the battery bank after a trip. Not many folks are as dedicated to that effort as you are.
More likely vibration caused one of the trojans to fail, and the constant charging from solar can "hide" the problem until there is a large load. So the other three "good" jars fell on their swords trying to charge that one bad cell. It was not a catastrophic failure.
That happened to me with my bank of 3 twelve volts. I was at a campground and the Magnum inverter one morning was pouring 64 amps of charge into the banks. I separated them--the bank of four was still functional, but the bank of three within a few moments of being disconnected started producing H2S gas. It drove me and a guest out of the RV in about ten minutes. Fortunately there were no other campers in the sites on either side of us.
I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and called a mobile RV repair person who disconnected and took away all of the bank of three.
