Curious issue....
I went out to the boat Friday evening. Checked the battery bank voltage for the 48V Torqeedo - the display read 56V (fully charged, maybe a tad high). Note that the charger was still plugged in. I left the Torqeedo "on", but unplugged, cast off, and motored out using the GAS engine.
When I checked a few minutes later, the motor indicated an error: Dead batteries.
Back at the dock, the battery voltage for the batteries read almost zero. Very strange. To go from what I thought was fully charged to completely dead without running the motor? I could understand a short - but that would generally also give lots of smoke... I went ahead and unplugged the charger from the battery bank and went home for the night.
The bank is made up of 4 x 12V deep cycle lead/acid marine batteries. They are relatively new (9 months old?). Not used much. The charger is a Soneil 48V, 2A charger from Thunderstruck.
Since I suspect the charger, and hope the batteries are still good, I bought 4 cheap 12V chargers locally, and took them out the next day.
By now, the battery voltage on all 4 batteries "floated up / recovered" to 9V. This was borderline too low for a trickle charger to work - they tend to read that voltage and shut down, rather than try to charge. I had also brought along an "old school" charger (probably a transformer and diode inside) that I put on each of the batteries for about 15 min to bring it up enough that the 4 trickle chargers would work....
Once I had all 4 trickle chargers going, I was able to turn the Torqeedo on, and run the Torqeedo (at VERY LOW POWER) for a minute or two, just to ensure that the motor and wiring was good. All seems to be ok.
SOOOOO>>>>>
Is it possible to have a battery bank that is essentially DEAD, but still reads enough voltage (at no load) to trick the charger into thinking it's fully charged??
How does one get a "smart charger" to fully charge a battery?
We've had a couple of weeks of temps over 100 degrees (which would be VERY hot inside the locker in the boat). Would this likely be the problem?
I'm still tempted to build a batch of "old school" chargers that just dump a regulated voltage at low current... But I haven't found a good schematic for anything that I can easily put together to put out up to 2 amps.
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