Hi Jeff,
It's awesome that Sears was happy to replace the batteries for you under warranty. I often recommend the DieHard Platinums for exactly that reason (plus the nationwide availability).
However those EnerSys batteries are very hard to kill (I have been abusing mine for a long time!)... and based on the description you provided I suspect that root cause of the issue is related to the charging, and not the batteries themselves. In other words; I think that the batteries were simply discharged, not defective. For starters, your charger (and solar panel/controller) are small considering your 200Ah of AGM's. At the voltage you stated (13.2) the batteries would
never have reached 100% SOC. They should have been absorption charged at 14.7V and should have been float charged at 13.6. In addition
if they had been fully charged and then disconnected when you parked the TC for the winter those AGM's would have a storage life of more than 2 years.
The test that Sears conducted is so far outside of EnerSys's charge & testing protocol that it's laughable... and a 4 minute charge (regardless of current) is followed by a high current discharge is meaningless.
EnerSys has specific guidelines for charging deeply discharged batteries and states that a group 31 battery should be charged at 5A for 24 hours and the voltage should be allowed to rise to as much as 18.0V (the Boondocker can't do that)... then the batteries should have been removed from the charger for 18 hours before capacity testing.
Anyway, now that you have fresh batteries I suggest that you download the
TECHNICAL MANUAL from EnerSys and review the information in the charging section. If you are hoping to get many years of service and high capacity from the Platinums, you may also want to consider a larger and more configurable battery charger and solar controller.
Cheers,
-Mark
