PD or Iota for my upgrade?

Salvo wrote:
Adding to the list of required items for the PD to be in constant current is adequate ac voltage. But perhaps most important is low charge rate. A 12% rate won't win any races, but as you have shown it will keep the unit in constant current. The greater the charge rate, the more critical ac voltage becomes.

How does the PD react to half the battery capacity? A short 15 min charge test would be interesting. How does the ac voltage look? Can you monitor it while charging. The dc voltage at the converter is also interesting to look at. Just my "wish list" if you're going to retest.

Sal

ktmrfs wrote:

so I guess the PD Can be a constant current source for a long while IF you have low enough resistance in the leads, and a big enough battery bank.

2 1/2 hours, down to 57.5A and up to 80%SOC

I had the second trimetric voltage input basically tied to the converter output. At the 60A charging current, the trimetric was consistently showing 0.1 volts higher at the converter than the battery. Once it tapered to about 40A or so, both readings were the same, since the trimetric resolution is only 0.1V. In reality it was probably slightly above 0.1V@60A since with a 90A inverter load I see 0.2V difference between the battery and inverter input on the trimetric. And the second battery voltage terminal is at the inverter input which is less than 6" away from the converter output.

The #3/0 wire definitely made a big difference and I needed that anyway for the 1000W inverter.

As to AC voltage, I have the trailer hooked to my 30A service and the only thing running in the trailer was the converter connected through #12 wire. Nominal line voltage at our house is usually in the 120V range, but I didn't measure at the converter. Definitely wasn't operating at the low line voltage limit for the PD, which I know is an issue with output current.

At some point I'll be repeating the charge cycle running off my honda 2000 and will be able to compare to power line results.

going to a bigger converter would be nice, but I need to be able to run it off a single honda 2000 if needed, and that limits my choices to the powermax PF corrected units, since a bigger non PF corrected PD or Iota is an iffy situation with the honda 2000, especially at high temps and higher altitude. With my present setup of a PD45 in the distribution panel and the PD60 in the pass through I can run both if I have the current available. that's my next experiment to try. I can do that when I have my honda 2000 pair as well. Downside is that the PD 45A unit is in the middle of the trailer with about 20' of #4 on the hot side, which is anything but ideal.

As it is, with just the 60A I can go 50-90 in 3.5hrs on a 490AH bank. And recently I went 3 days on that bank in cold weather running the furnace quite a bit before I was down to 50%.

I have given thought to replacing the PD60A with the newest boondocker 100A, but don't know how much time it will gain for me. Anyone with the boondocker and 4GC or a pair of L-16's that has experience with the 50-90 charge time with the boondocker 100A??