Battery Maintenance, multiple batteries

NO storage battery on the face of the earth should be left unattended unless it has monitoring and alarm devices. One battery and one float charger can raise just as much hell as four (not fourteen or four hundred) floating batteries. Four is about my personal limit as percentages start to get too high to expect one battery in the lot to fail.

As far as multiple batteries charging on the same string I have 24. If the flat voltage value is acceltae to the battery it doesn't make a bit of differene if one or a bundted batteries are on line. Greening rooms typically have more than two hundred batteries onj
Ine.

smkettner wrote:
As long as you fully charge each battery and float at 13.2 they will all be fine in parallel.

Theoretically that is true but...........
With batteries connected in parallel like that a failure of one, or the charger itself, can have swift and nasty results.
This is over and above the fact that not all of them will charge equally.

If you do that, at least put a fuse in the wire to each battery.

I wouldn't do it at all.

Except under extreme conditions, or the non-availability of power for a charger, there is NO good reason to remove the batteries in the off season. A charged standard wet cell battery won't freeze until something like -60 F and moderate cold, down to 0F or so is actually good for them.

Yes, down in the basement ;)

smkettner wrote:
As long as you fully charge each battery and float at 13.2 they will all be fine in parallel.

Is there a Honolulu, Indiana?

You know - where it's seventy two degrees in January?

I even parallel different types of 12v batteries on a maintainer, and never have a problem. A 1.5 anp maintainer will easily maintainer 4 batteries.

I put 4 gr 27's in parallel for the winter and use a battery tender. Top off the water and they were fine for 7 months. SG was good this spring

Yes smk has it. Each battery has to be brought to "true full" as measured by SG (bobber hydrometer). Then and only then, can they be paralleled and left on a Float charge (proper voltage for that depends on ambient temp--eg, 50F 13.9, and 80F 13.2), so each one will stay more or less where it is at, and one won't "steal" from the other, because the charger has plenty for everybody.

As long as you fully charge each battery and float at 13.2 they will all be fine in parallel.

Use a battery maintainer with a four ampere capability. It is critical to have dependable power. If it goes off for two-weeks cannibalism runs rampant.

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