Battery charge/discharge indicator?

I installed a Blue Sea 50-0-50 ammeter. Not as snazzy a digital but I can basically see what is coming and going. I don't need smaller than 2 amp resolution and it has no idle draw.

You could get a hall-effect pickup (or two) and wire it into a circuit where it has threshold output to two indicators. As BFL mentioned, there's little point to it in a practical sense for most. I'm guessing you'd like to able to glance at the dash and see if your charging system and house batteries are recharging.

Do you have some particular criteria?

I can see how you could have such a thing, but not what good it would do you while camping.

The Trimetric shows when you have pos or neg amps going in or out, but you can't really do anything about it, whatever the amps are doing.

Solar is pos and when you need to run some item, it will be covered by the solar or not, there is nothing you can do about it if amps go neg while that is running.

What's the point? You watch your "morning voltage" each day till it gets down to 12.1v and now you must recharge the batts. Each moment between recharge times that amps go pos or neg is of no interest as such in my experience as it is all momentary.

All an ammeter needs is a shunt inline, and speaker wire going to the meter location.

A simple & cheap digital ammeter with a shunt will provide the information you are looking for and display the amount of charge/discharge current. Of course this is more complicated than a pair of LED's, but the additional info is useful.

If you want to get fancy consider installing a TriMetric meter which will display voltage, capacity, and current of your coach battery as well as the voltage of your starting battery.
-Mark

I had actually already seen that article when I was searching.

What it appears to do is give you a visual cue as to the state of voltage of the battery. But it does not tell you if it is charging or discharging.

You could have high voltage and still be discharging, for example.

What I'm really after is a "optical" ammeter that glows green when current goes one way and glows red when current goes the other way.

I'm surprised someone doesn't manufacture a dongle that you just put between your battery post and the terminal that normally connects to it, and this magic device has low-voltage leads that go to a bi-color LED display located remotely from the battery.

The problem with an actual ammeter is you have to wire it to handle all accessory load for the entire possible current that might be going through your system. That means heavy-gage (14 or thicker) wire going to wherever the ammeter is located.

Steve

LED indicator circuit

Very cool, Mex.
An advancement might be to place a translucent lens over the LED's with a partition between them. The incidental "glow" on the lens may be easier to see a balance point rather than gauging LED brilliance. I might have to build one of these, I think I have everything to slap one together. Thanks!

maillemaker, I believe what you are concerned with is ergonomics. The ability to discern whether or not the batteries are charging at a glance. A very quick glance. Am I correct? If not please correct me.

Or discharging. I figured it would be nice to have a red LED come on if discharging, and a green one if they are charging. At a glance you can tell whether your batteries are charging or discharging.

Steve

maillemaker, I believe what you are concerned with is ergonomics. The ability to discern whether or not the batteries are charging at a glance. A very quick glance. Am I correct? If not please correct me.