Hi BFL13,
You forgot to mention positive plate shedding which happens with every cycle and there is not a darn thing anyone can do about it.
You can more or less eliminate sulfation of the negative plates--you have proved this for literally years, and have documentation to prove it. (ty again for all your efforts).
In the OP's case fully charged may be between 8 and 9 amps.
You do need an ammeter and a volt meter.
Equalization should only be done on AGM jars when loss of capacity is noticed. It needs to be done gingerly while monitoring temperatures and amperage draw. Charge voltage must be close to the gassing voltage (which is temperature dependent) but should NEVER exceed the gassing voltage. This has the quaint name of "dancing on the needles".
BFL13 wrote:
Slow death by gradual sulfation is the fate of every battery, but you can speed that up by leaving them less than fully charged. It is only "damage" if it happens too soon for your battery budget. How much effort you put into caring for the batts is situational to your circumstances and the scenario.
The ONLY way to know if an AGM is truly full on a recharge is to observe the amps it accepts at the end of the recharge while the battery has no load on it.
You must have an ammeter and a voltmeter.
The regularly scheduled "equalization" on some chargers' profiles like once a week or once a month is not really a desulfation level equalization at all. It is just a dose of the regular "bulk" voltage of 14.x to prevent stratification of a flooded battery. N/A to AGMs AFAIK.
You have serious long drawn out tapering of the amps between 95-100% recharge so getting to proper full is not easy. Especially when the usual blurbs say "full" is when amps get down to about 2% of bank capacity in AH. That is maybe 98% SOC depending. So they are inviting you to be sulfated sooner than you might like.
