What's a good battery level monitor?
What's a good monitor that I can install in my Casita to see the battery level throughout the day? Ideally a monitor that draws minimal power since we boondock frequently. When we're camping in an...
Forum Discussion
BFL13 wrote:
If you keep charging past when the monitor says 100%, then your AH counter will be out of whack and needs to be reset to zero once you do get to True Full.
I don't know how your battery monitor works, but I can share with you how I believe my Aili battery monitor works...
On the Aili monitor, you set the total AH of your battery bank and you also tell the monitor when you are charged to 100% initially to set it up. As you use your battery, your AH and % full value starts declining based on how much is draining out of your battery. Then when you are charging your batteries, the battery monitor will climb it's way up to 100% status and 100% AH as current is flowing into the battery. Once your monitor gets to "100% full" your AH will also be listed as 100% of your total battery bank AH. It cannot go any higher.
Now let's assume that in actuality you are NOT at 100% SOC even though your battery monitor says that it is. With the Aili, if you continue charging (either through solar or generator or plugged in or your alternator), your battery monitor will still just say 100% full (and AH at your max) as it continues increasing the true SOC until eventually you actually are at true 100% SOC. There is no resetting necessary on the AHs or the total capacity %.
Another way of thinking about all of this.... Let's assume that your batteries are at 50% SOC. 50% full. And let's assume you have 200AH total in your battery bank. Let's say you program your Aili battery monitor and you tell it that your battery bank is 200AH and your are currently at 100% fully charged (even though you are in actuality only at 50% SOC). If your next step was to plug in your rig for 10 hours charging the batteries (or driving for several hours while your alternator charges your batteries) your battery monitor would say "100% full" and "200AH" during the entire time. Eventually, your batteries WOULD BE at 100% and your monitor would now be showing you the proper SOC. No need to reset/etc.
And as mentioned before, at any time you can use the monitor to display the battery voltage to tell you where things are at.
Hope that makes sense.
-Chris
