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profdant139's avatar
profdant139
Explorer II
Apr 30, 2018

Working voltage, resting voltage, and the 50 percent rule

Just for the sake of curiosity, I've been trying to determine a correlation between the working voltage of my batteries ( measured while running all of the lights in my trailer) as distinguished from the resting voltage (measured after the battery has been disconnected and has been sitting for a while).

My goal is to try to determine when the battery is really at a 50 percent, since I'm told that we are not supposed to run 12V deep cycle batteries below 12.1 volts, or roughly 50 percent.

So I have two questions: when they say don't run down the battery to below 12.1, that means the resting voltage, right?

And second, is there an accurate correlation between working voltage and resting voltage? For example, if the battery reads 12.2 while under load, does that necessarily correspond to (let's say) 12.4 when resting?

It would be handy to be able to measure the voltage of the battery while in use and come up with a good approximation of the true state of charge, without having to disconnect everything and then wait a while till the battery reaches its resting state. (Usually, when we are camping, I don't have a lot of free time to make those kinds of careful measurements -- DW always wants to hit the hiking trails asap, instead of hanging around and looking at the multi-meter.)

Thanks in advance for your opinions and expertise!

(By the way, these are three year old group 31s rated at 110 amp hours, and the hydrometer indicates that all the cells are doing fine. We have had no trouble with these batteries.)

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