Thread: Battery Level

Hi Garry and the Allrounder is a Calcium/Calcium ( Ca/Ca ) battery and as such, your 41.1v will charge the battery but Ca/Ca batteries need a periodical boost or equalisation charge.

If your battery charger does not have that cycle or stage, then your battery will continually loose capacity.

If you have an 80w solar panel, connect it directly to the battery ( no reg ) and leave it that way for a week or so.

If the battery is stuffed then you can’t make it worse but if it is recoverable, this will bring it back to a much higher capacity and it will also hold it’s charge longer.

Again, you can only try.

BTW, if you do use the 80w solar panel, don’t be too surprised if you hear the battery bubbling. This is what you want to happen.

Originally Posted by drivesafe

Hi Garry and the Allrounder is a Calcium/Calcium ( Ca/Ca ) battery and as such, your 41.1v will charge the battery but Ca/Ca batteries need a periodical boost or equalisation charge.

Thanks - the charger is supposedly automatically detects and adjusts for different types of batteries including calcium (supposedly). The point you make about needing a periodically boost is why the battery goes on the charger every couple of weeks and on a manual setting of its max 12amps full charge at the start.

My solar panels are 120w - is that an issue??

Garry

Hi Garry and Ca/Ca batteries, particularly deep cycle type, but cranking batteries also need a high voltage charge cycle and while your panel is a bit big, you can still try it and see if the battery comes back.

Suggested method, with the battery fully charge by your battery charge, connect your solar panel to your battery on a day you can both track the panel to get maximum rays and keep an eye on the battery voltage.

If the voltage in the battery looks like going over 18v, remove the panel for a while, say an hour and then reconnect.

Thats not a typo, I have a stuffed cranking battery and I managed to get some capacity back into it ( for how long? ) and it is now working fine, plus I now have the DT90 isolator and optima as added power, but I regularly leave the panel on all day.

In my case, the panel is an 80 watter and the maximum the cranking battery gets to is about 17.7v. The Optima never gets above 14.9v because the DT90 has over voltage protection.

Again, you will hear your battery bubbling but this is what you need it to get.

BTW, I don’t trust my battery but it is working, for now, and has been for nearly 6 months.

My cranking battery is still seriously down in total capacity but at present it is working fine, even on the coldest mornings, and note, I do not disconnect anything, I just connect the panel straight to the cranking battery, via a set of 30 amp Anderson Power Poles, permanently wired to the cranking battery.