BFL wrote:
"On recharge you must allow some AH for heat when figuring your SOC. The Trimetric uses 4% but this might not be what your batteries do at the time at your charging rate. The Trimetric AH comes out fairly close on cross-checking when you do get the batts to 100% as measured by hydrometer."
this seems to confirm what i have been considering, concerning the excessive gassing of my 430 Ah bank. before i installed the pm, i was using the peak 40 amper for all my charging. it would run for about 4 hours, rising to 14.8 - 14.9 volts, and holding steady at 40 amps for about the first hour, and then begin to taper. it would then hold its voltage, and amps would taper over the next few hours. all normal, yes?
however, this was all taking place when the batts were already between 90 and 100%. for i was charging at ~12.6v batts (~90% soc)EDIT--(~ -43Ah)--. and if in fact 90% soc is when the charge current drops to about 5a per 100Ah capacity; so ~21a on a 430Ah bank; at 14.8v, and a little higher at 14.9v, then where did all those extra amps go??? for you can't put 40++ Ah's back in where only EDIT--43Ah's-- were removed... this has bothered me for months now. AND this is why i originally thought i was going thru way more Ah usage than i should have been, according to simple pre-calculations and actual real time usage.
so it seems to me all those extra amps the peak was pounding into the batts were turning into heat and boiling the batts. and charging at 14.9v at 80+ degree temps would only exacerbate this. having said that, i still don't understand why the peak's amps didn't taper faster? is it because there was still a considerable voltage spread between charger and batts? and is this the issue with trying to top charge a large bank, and why it takes soooo long?
