Question For AGM Battery Owners...
Are there folks out there who have decided they do not like AGM batteries and believe their AGM battery purchase was a mistake, and should have purchased standard flooded lead acid batteries instead? ...
Forum Discussion
MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
Concorde Lifeline's PDF file download is pretty much the last-word on care and maintenance of absorbed glass mat batteries. There is no mention of trends and tendencies monitoring using a reliable Amp Hour meter but it general the manual can be trusted, utterly.
http://www.lifelinebatteries.com/manual.pdf
X2!
In a nutshell, for a 100AH AGM: charge at 14.3V until charge is 0.5A( 1/2 of 1%) or less. The battery is now ready for use or storage. If stored then switch to 13.3V and float indefinitely. A practical charger would be slightly lower than the battery's AH.
It is best to use a temperature compensating charger that uses a cable to sense the battery temperature since Amps/electrons will warm the AGM. The charger can then adjust the charging/float Volts up for a cold or down for a hot battery. This warming is very slight for AGMs.
I like Magnum PSW inverter/chargers. A cheaper and less efficient charger-only is the 55Amp, $175 Parallax Powermode 4455TC with TempAssure.
Automatic chargers like these that can do a good enough job, but an annual capacity test is needed. My Magnum recently applied 50A for 53 minutes into my 100AH AGM while raising the temp from 67F to 71F. Beforehand, I had run a capacity test that left the AGM at 11.8V resting.
I don't have enough equipment to know what the % capacity of the battery is, but I do know it will do a day's work in a day.
HTH;
John
