Monday, December 27, 2010

Battery Saga continues

In my previous post, I commented on battery C dragging down the system. Since then, I recharged battery C and put it back into the array. For the first day or two, things were fine. However, when I returned the next week, the entire array was again reading 19V. I ran the battery equalizer function on the charge controller and this failed to resolve the issue.


I didn't do anything else with it right away, and then I went on vacation. Today however, I went ahead and investigated the batteries again. A&B had 12V while C&D had 7V. As a test, I decided to rotate the batteries, moving battery C to A's spot and battery A to C's spot. B & C paired together nicely, but when I went to pair A & D together, I got sparkage. A little sparkage isn't an issue, so I held the wire on. The contact area maintained an electric glow and after a few seconds, battery D began bubbling.

Now, I then tested each battery individually and found D holding at 7V while C had 11V. I also checked the specific gravity and D shows as being "fair" with some wells being "good". I don't like the sound of bubbling battery acid in my van, so I am going to take D home and charge it with the trickle charger. Alternatively, I might just take it to the store I got it from and ask them to check it out.

In the mean time, I connected two of my good batteries in series. At least this way, I have enough power to run the inverter because it will shut off if the voltage dips below 19V and 19V is about the maximum I can get out my system with the bad battery in.

2 comments:

  1. I'm glad that you finally made a sign, happy holidays! I hope your vacation went well :)
    given the bad weather and the extreme and urgent need for a nice warm place to be in, I think you should better replace the non functional batteries, it would be risky to stay in a van without a working heater, be safe and good luck :)

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  2. Thanks for the comment.

    I actually have a propane heater (catalytic) for heating the van. It works pretty well. For instance, I can go out to the van with the temperature at 24F, run the heater for about 30-40 minutes to get the temperature up to 50F.

    I now have the bad battery back at the store being checked out. In the meantime, I'm running off two of the remaining batteries, which is enough to run my laptop. :-D

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