Hi,
Sorry for your issues. To prevent this happening in the future change to a charge controller that has temperature compensated charging. What charge controller do you have? Does it have adjustable voltage set points?
Basically the jars may have been under charged for the whole time you have owned them--because the charging voltage is too low.
A trickle charger would have made zero difference to this problem--unless it was temperature compensated.
Do follow the advice on the Lifeline page to recondition the existing batteries. You may need to "dance on the needles" to recover the jars.
