As an alternative to multi-chargers:
Is anyone using battery balancers or bypass regulators for their series strings of flooded or AGM's?
One of the main problems in charging with single charger for our strings is that the individual batteries (and internal cells) inevitably get imbalanced-- -some batteries get fully charged first, voltage rises, charger shuts down and leaves one or more batteries less than fully charged. This perpetuates, cycle after cycle with none of the batteries ever fully charging. Bypass regulators are a common way to get some balance into this charging picture: Batteries which reach a set voltage begin passing current around them, allowing the slower charging batteries to "catch up", reaching the charged voltage closer and closer at the same time with subsequent charge cycles. Outlier batteries can be detected over time and replaced. One of the simplest bypass setups for lead acid batteries is commonly known as "Lee Hart's Shunt Type Battery Balancer"---it consists of little more than 2 power zener diodes, 2 ring terminals and a PR2 flashlight bulb. Build one per 12v battery and this setup will begin shunting at 13.6v and shunt up to 0.5amps at around 15v. Not much, but enough shunting to keep nominally good batteries in line.
A link to Battery Balancers: http://www.camerons oftware.com/ ev/EV_BatteryMan agementSystems. html
-MT
No comments:
Post a Comment