jrnymn7 wrote:
....how does one who pays little to no attention to their batteries recognize when performance has declined
I'm not Salvo, however:
I do a load test on my RV batteries periodically to determine if they're close to needing replacement due to permanently lowered capacity. For instance, my RV's battery bank is 200 amp hours so I recently loaded them with about a 17-20 amp load for five hours, then I let them rest for about one hour disconnected from any load, and at that point I checked the voltage on their terminals and it was around 12.3X volts. This meant they could still supply around 100 amps over five hours before showing a terminal voltage indicating that were getting close to one-half empty. Hence, they don't need replacing yet.
When camping, I can tell when the batteries are getting close to 90% - 95% full when being charged because the permanent ammeter in their circuit shows they're only accepting only around 3-5 amps. The ammeter shows zero amps when they're fully charged regardless of the voltage the charger applies to their terminals.
I do like Salvo does when camping to determine if they're getting close to needing a charge. I constantly monitor their output voltage with a voltmeter (permanently hooked up) that reads to one one-hundreth of a volt (i.e. a four place voltmeter -> XX.XX display). When their output voltage is around 11.9X volts or so, I charge them.
I've been doing this for a little over eight years with the same set of RV batteries.
