Should I Change My WFCO Converter?
Opinions have often been expressed, both on this and other RV forums, that most stock RV converters are inadequate to properly charge and maintain batteries and are often of poor quality. It is frequ...
Forum Discussion
liketoride2 wrote:MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
Question:
If the sole duty of an auxiliary manual charger is to provide a single value charging voltage limit, is not the factory pot on the Megawatt adequate to play with, tweak and then use at that setting until death-do-us-part? Or, is your thought bent toward using the Mega for a 2nd battery maintenance chore?
My thought and hope, a hope not based on an adequate knowledge base, is that the Megawatt will do two things for me using generator power:
1. Do an adequate equalizing charge as needed at the voltage recommended by Trojan, 15.5 volts. Since these are new Trojans this would be needed only very occasionally at first, I would think.
2. Do the first, bulk, stage of a three phase charge at the 14.8 volts recommended by Trojan.
Following that it is hope that the charge could be turned over to the WFCO for the absorption and float stages, but, judging by reports on this thread, this can not always be relied upon. In that case I hope the Megawatt could manually be set to do an absorption stage, then the float stage by the WFCO. Can the Megawatt do a float stage if the WFCO isn't even capable of doing that?
Seems to still be confusion wrt "stages."
When you set the charger to 14.8 or whatever, the 14.8 is the Absorption Voltage (Vabs) The Bulk Stage is the time the batteries take to get up to 14.8v with the constant amps from the charger at its current limit (the "size" of the charger in amps.)
The Absorption Stage is when the charger is holding the voltage at Vabs while amps taper until the batts are charged.
So as Mex is saying, just set the voltage you want for Vabs (Trojan wants 14.8v) and leave it there. That gets the batteries charged up as far as you want depending on how much generator time you like or are allowed to have by the park you are in.
If you ever have shore power, then just use the WFCO at its 13.6 That only leaves equalizing as a time to fiddle with the charger's voltage pot.
BTW the low charging rate choice (40 vs 75) just adds to gen time which can be ok if there is no limit on that. Here, the BC provincial parks (off grid) allow gens from 9-11am and 6-8pm. It is dark 6-8pm in the winter so I want to get it (a 50-90) done in that two hours in the morning. That means I have to balance my usage, battery bank size, charging rate, and generator size to be able to run that much charging rate, so the 50-90 can be done in two hours. I have equipped the RV accordingly.
The OP is sounding like the amount of gen time he will do is up to him. Not always! :)
