Few people these days, upgrade alternators. They are so big that they will easily charge banks of LOW batteries, back to a usable state, in normal driving.
So again, no need to upgrade alternators these days.
Tim, what is a 'smart' alternator? I'm running a 175 amp Reece Neville to charge 4 x N70 in series/parallel, it takes a few minutes for the volt gauge to recover from twenty V. The last batteries only just made warranty.
My old D2a has a 130a alternator and it easilly runs 2x 12v fridges and keeps 3x batteries topped up.
I recently added a fridge and 80ah battery to my boat the alternator also easilly runs this as well as the 2x fridges, cranking and 2x 110ah deep cell batteries while i am travelling.
I don't have any flash dc to dc charger or any other isolator gizmo fitted I have simply added cabling from the cranking battery to an Anderson plug at the rear of the truck and via a daisychain of anderson plugs i run the whole shebang directly from the cranking battery/alternator.
The only thing I have to do when I pull up is to disconect the daisychain from the rear anderson plug to make sure that the cranking battery isn't affected.
A very Very simple setup and it works[thumbsupbig]
well your crank battery is connected to your alternator. so, if your alternator is putting out 14.0, your battery should be showing 14.0 too (minus any small loss due to cable size).
to complicated matters, just because the voltage at the battery is 14.0volts, doesnt mean it is full. it could be full, or it could be half full and charging.
you're so close to getting this right :)
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Thanks for the correction, Ron. [bigwhistle]
your correct, the isolator is to protect the crank battery from discharge.
when the alternator is spinning, the battery is being charged, and there is ample capacity to charge both batteries. so why not do it?
yes but no. its nowhere near dramatic as that.
depending on the alternator, lets take a 100amp alternator for example. 700rpm (idle) might be capable of pushing out 80amps and 1000rpm is capable of the full 100amps.