It's great to listen to all the guys that are anal on this (thats a compliment), but for day to day camping I watch the SOC almost exclusively. Even though the batteries are 6 months old, I don't think I'm interested in tracking their degradation when I can place the Magnum in 'auto' and let it re-cal by itself. Gotta trust something...
I'm also not sure that resting the batteries before looking at SOC is practical either since, according to the book, part of the calculation is load. And since the inverter shuts off at 10.5 (or whatever), it's gonna do that under said load, so it only makes sense to me to look at SOC while the evening load is running. AH is a nice nite-nite reading to see what the evening damage was, and I look at that and my watch in the morning to see about when the solar will be done cooking for the day.
Anything more involved with care and feeding, this is the place to come, and this thread is one of the better ones on it.
