Balmar SG200 Problem

May 6, 2010
472
1984 Oday 39 79 Milwaukee
Around the middle of this summer I again reached out to Balmar to tell them I was done trying to get the SG200 to work and that I would appreciate my money back due to the hours of time invested over a year and half, and repeated promises that the next update would solve the ongoing problem. I had a long phone conversation with Chris and agreed to give it one more try with the latest updates. After spending the remainder of the summer with the last set of updates, I believe the system is finally reporting reliable battery information. In discussing my situation with Chris (we are on a mooring and only charge the bank with shore power a couple times during the season) he highly recommended a small solar panel so that the bank is able to be brought to full charge each week. This is something I will be looking at over the winter.

Since we hauled out two days ago I have found I have a new issue to track down where the monitor is reporting 0% SOC while reporting a battery voltage of 12.8, and my charger indicating the bank is at full charge...
 

Ward H

.
Nov 7, 2011
3,645
Catalina 30 Mk II Barnegat, NJ
My SG200 has been reporting 90% SOH consistently since I installed it on my then 1 yr old batteries.
In August I left the charger off for a few days at a time to let the batteries drop to around 55% SOC/12.2V. I did this three times in a month.
Now the SG200 is reporting 100% SOH.
SOC has always seemed accurate when compared to battery voltage.
My thought is the updates and cycling the batteries a few times did resolve the SOH stuck at 90 problem.
 
Feb 2, 2006
464
Hunter Legend 35 Kingston
Seafuller, Ward H,

I have been working with Chris at Balmar about my issues (always 90% or 100% SOH, and no other values). I got a few 0% SOC alerts (when there was no possibility of that actual value). Chris requested I send in my unit so they could inspect/debug and he sent me a new one. One of the last things I had done with my SG200 before sending it back was to re-apply the chemistry. Apparently, without doing this, just appling a firmware update, wont update your device with the new chemistries. After doing that I did start to get some different SoH value, but that is when I also got the 0% alerts.

Anyway .... my experience with the new shunt (which I don't expect had anything in it that should have fixed things), was that I of course had to apply the new chemistry as it was uninitialized (FLA). Since using it all summer, I have had all sorts of SOH reading that ranged from 70% to 100%. Ranged is the operative work, and the fact that it wasn't just 90% or 100% seems to be a good thing. But it still often gravitates to 90% after a period of shore charging. It seems that having the solar charging on and the fridge on creates a combination of in and out that gives the SG200 a bit of a headache and that's when the SOH reading become quite variable (I've had some readings in the 70% range at times).

With that I have had "Low SOC" and "Low SOH" alarms. 0% or single digit values. This appears to be a computation bug as there is no chance of either having happened.

At this point, the SOC values (except for the LOW SoC alarms) seem good, but the SoH reading is all over the map and not of much worth. I have run the system down and fully recharged a number of times and while that seemed to help, but the SoH values are still not worth much.

Chris
 
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Ward H

.
Nov 7, 2011
3,645
Catalina 30 Mk II Barnegat, NJ
Interesting. I’ll have to ensure mine is set to the correct battery chemistry.
Thanks for that tip.
I do run a fridge 24/7, seems to draw <5a.
 
May 6, 2010
472
1984 Oday 39 79 Milwaukee
I too had to reapply the chemistries. My state of health still fluctuates as well but I am much less concerned about that than I am the state of charge generally.
 
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