time2roll wrote:
OK say you had a 35 amp WFCO connected to 4x GC2 with 20' of #2 wire... Should that work?
How low does the battery need to be? 12.0 volts?
Mine still does not work.
OK at some point they do work because if I slam the low battery with my inverter and 150 amp load for 20 seconds the WFCO actually goes to charging at 14.4 volts.
No need to talk about twice getting stuck 12+ hours in boost mode at random after being plugged in a few days. Or not dropping to float after a week.
As if I was the only one... Not.
The WFCO converters I have run at 13.6 volts output when powered up, then switch to boost mode if the 13.6 gets pulled down to 13.2. (I can only speak for the units I've measured because there's no published spec for this). I'm assuming 2 #2 conductors, 20 feet long, for a total of 40'. Crunching the numbers, that's a 0.22 volt drop at 35 amps. That's pretty huge compared to the 0.4 volts drop required at the converter output, but answering how low the battery would have to be, it would be 12.98 volts (assuming no further losses in the connections).
All the praise I heap on the WFCO converters is with the design. Without the reliability problems fixed, most of them are boat anchors, bricks, etc. I use one as a standalone battery charger, which it is great for, and 2 others sit on the shelf next to my PD converter.
Regarding the converters in general, lack of temp compensation was mentioned, and for some, power factor correction is a big issue. The Xantrex Truecharge 2 has both of these features, you just have to be willing to pay twice the price of the mainstream RV converters, and of course hope that they are reliable and work correctly.
