OK, short of tossing 12 batteries...
By "bad" I mean a battery that will accept a full charge, but discharges well in advance of the other batteries in the string (so...it's not a shorted cell which I think is an automatic toss, but rather likely plate degradation)
I have already tried de-sulfating - I can see improvement, but not enough.
My theory is...if I pair a new battery with the worst of the pack (in parallel) then that unit now acts like a medium-good battery in relation to the others (the good battery will be trying to continually charge the bad one during discharge - conversely during charge the good battery will be helping the charger see it's "full" and go into float). I think I still won't get the full pack amperage, but some "average" value determined by the weakest pair.
There are lots of warnings about not doing this - but no clear explanations.
Any battery gurus care to comment on the strategy?
I've split my 12 into 2 separate banks now - 1 bank of 4 batteries (all aged) and 1 of 8 (2ea in parallel for the above balancing). I'm using my old red Perko switch so I can combine or run each bank independent. This allows me to isolate and test "bad" batteries individually and re-shuffle the packs to find the proper balance.
Also...my chargers do not have an equalization setting. Short of buying one that does have one - is there another way to do an equalization? Maybe that can further help the weak batteries.
Am I doomed to visiting Walmarts return counter?
Thx
-Keith
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