Battery science says if you hit your battery bank with 14.4VDC charge voltage it will demand 17-20AMPS from the source for each battery in the bank. Your converter/charger source must have enoough capacity to handle the demand.
This will re-charge your batteries to their 90% charge state in about three hours time. It will take a full 12-14 hours to charge the batteries to a full 100% charge state.
A 90% charged battery bank will have a good 99% of total capacity for you to use when camping off the batteries. However you must do a full 100% charge state for your batteries if you do more thean 10 or so 50% to 90% charge state cycless otherwise you will start doing damage to the batteries...
You can run higher DC Voltages but then run the risk of overheating the batteries and boiling out their fluids... This is why the Industry picks the 14.4VDc rate. Does minimal boiling out of fluids for the short time of charging...
This is all posted in most of the Progressive Dynamics Manuals for their various chargers like the PD9200 series.
We camp alot off grid and have our battery bank expanded to run all the things we want to run in ONE DAY and not drop our battery bank DC VOLTAGE to lower than 12.0VDC. Then the next morning we will connect our trailer up to our 2KW generator using a RV30A-15A long adapater and run the on-board PD9260C converter/charger to recharge our 255AH battery bank back up to its 90% charge state in a three hour generator run time. usualy do this at breakfast each morning. Then we are good to do this all over again for the next day/night run off the batteries... Have done this method many times over the past few years when camping off the batteries. Stll have the same batteries that was installed in 2009...
I never had any luck with my WFCO 8900 series unit ever going into BOOST charge states. It always just produced 13.6VDC for me... Changed it out in 2009 for the PD9260C converter unit... 13.6VDC will take days to recharge your batteries to their 90% charge state. Progressive Dynamics says "Required 40-hours to return the battery to 90% of full charge and 78-hours to reach full charge." using 13.6VDC
Roy Ken
