Pro Charge Ultra stops charging.

[ontherocks83]

I have a new Sterling Power Pro Charge Ultra 40A that I installed last year.

I have been away from the boat for 2 or 3 weeks and it has been plugged in the whole time. The only load on the charger is a Dometic electric cooler that draws about .5 a/h.

When I arrived today my Balmar battery monitor said the batteries were at 59% and the voltage was around 12.4 to 12.5v.

The charger was on, the fan was running at level 3 and the output was reading 0 amps and 0 volts. I disconnected and then reconnected the ac power, the charger cycled off then on and started charging the batteries again.

This happened once last year which I am attaching a picture of but I forgot to take a pic today.

Does anyone have any ideas why this might be happening? I ended up having to throw away the food in my cooler because it disconnected when it saw low voltage.

 

[FDuq]

I have a dometic cooler also. I use a MinnKota 3stage charger. Go into your settings menu on the Donetic cooler, lower the voltage which your cooler will shut off to ~10.5, then the charger will kick on way before your cooler “sees” the 10.5v since the charger will ramp up the charge way before your battery bank goes all the way down to 10.5v

 

[Benny17441]

Hard to tell, the charger has some protection devices that will shut it down in cases of a drop or surge in input voltage and certain battery conditions. Ask around the marina to see if there have been any thunderstorms or power failures during this time interval. Other than ascertaining that shore power installation is in a good reliable state and that the battery is healthy, my suggestion would be to contact the manufacturers support or customer service and explain both occurrences. Chances are that the two events are related but there is always a possibility that they could be due to different factors. I personally never trusted leaving anything other than beer in the boat's refrigerator as in more than one occasion I have found the switch to the power pedestal in the Off position.

 

[ontherocks83]

So as a follow up I emailed Maine Sail who sold me the charger and he got back to me within a few hours!

Apparently there is a factory setting in the charger that sets it to a default California compliant charging mode where the charger goes to sleep after the batteries are topped off. All I have to do is change it from BC mode to PS mode by pressing 2 buttons.

I am super thankful and impressed for Maine Sail's post product support and can't recommend him enough to use/support/purchase/donate to his website.

The fix is, to turn off the charger, then turn it back on, and when the display says bc, press the down arrow where it will read ps and then hit enter. This way it won't go to sleep in California mode and will stay awake to keep the batteries where they should be.