Battery question for you electrical types....

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W

walt

dead horse

One final idea..

There is a connection to the battery from the charger wire and the charge controller sense voltage line is possibly connected to this connection.

If this connection has developed some resistance over time, it could affect the charge controller but nothing else. For example, at 60 amps, you would only need .016 ohms to give 1 volt rise at the location where the charge controller sensing was connected. The charge controller sees the battery voltage plus the extra "parasitic" voltage and undercharges the battery.

If you have a seperate starter battery, you might not see this issue and if you measured the voltage to the charge controller with no current flowing (or low current), you might not also see the drop.

The solution to this is to have the charge controller have its own seperate sense voltage connection to the battery post somehow. Since this connection now has no current flowing through it, small impedances do not cause any problem. And if your present connection does have a small impedance and you seperate the charge controller sense voltage, the small impedance should not matter.

The small impedance developing in the battery connector might explain the month to month degradation?
 
Feb 26, 2004
23,349
Catalina 34 224 Maple Bay, BC, Canada
Try equalizing again

1. You should do it monthly anyway if you're using your boat regularly (or as much as you'd LIKE to be using it:))

2. Equalizing gets a full charge in because of the time it takes to perform, so if you'd been getting the steadily diminishing law of returns of charging because you were depending only on your alternator, it's like pulling up to a dock with shorepower for a night.
 
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