sjturbo wrote:
Bare with me on this. I just spent 2wks boondocking with my two Crown 325ahr 6v GC batteries. Every 4th day I ran the eu3000 4hrs to recharge up from 12.3V. Would I be better off connecting a battery charger to the gene and hooking direct to the batteries?
You don't say how far up in SOC you got to in that four hours. You don't say how many amps you started out with. You do say it took four days to get down to 60% SOC. That is irrelevant to how long it should take to recharge a normal "50-90."
If you have enough charger (in amps) and enough gen (in watts) to run the charger, you can use about 30% charging rate to advantage. So a 325 bank would take say a 100amp charger no problem for the fast charge.
My Honda 3000 can do 130 amps of Vector chargers before popping its breaker. If I use power-factor corrected chargers in the mix instead, then I can get more charging amps before overloading the Honda.
"Oh dear," people will say, "you will kill those batts!" Nope. I have done this a lot. The batts have their own "natural acceptance rate" they cannot exceed, so they will taper the amps as they wish. You cannot hurt them.
So the answer is you can use additional charging amps to "do better" and reduce gen time. I usually do my four 6s (458AH) from 50-90 in two hours using a 100amp charger. So if you are taking four hours to go from 60-? on a mere 325AH bank, then yes, you can "do better"---way better!!!