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Faunsdale, AL | Think about this……..truck manufacturers have been connecting multiple 12 volt batteries in parallel and charging and loading/discharging them for decades now.
I can’t see how we need to get all picky and say that it’s going to ruin a good battery if someone hooks a slow charger to them overnight or even for a couple days. They’re hooked together and until I discover that one is bad they’re going to stay hooked together and be charged and loaded together. Even if I charge them separately, when I hook them back together, they’re going to equalize their state of charge until their terminal voltages are equal. At that point I have a large battery that’s got a terminal voltage that’s probably a pretty good indication of their state of charge.
That being said, once I charge a bank of batteries together, if I have any concern there’s a bad one in there, I’ll disconnect all the grounds and either load test them or just let them sit a day and see which ones are losing voltage and which ones are holding. If I find a bad one, then I have to make a decision about whether I’m going to just go without the bad one, replace it with another used/good battery, replace it with a new battery (don’t like to do that) or replace them all with new. I like to do that until I get the bill!
Smart chargers do complicate things. You can fool one and make it charge a dead battery (which it usually won’t do for some inexplicable reason) by hooking a second battery in parallel with the dead one to put some charge into it ??????? Not sure exactly what happens but it works. Then once you get it to charge the pair/string, I do wind up breaking them apart to charge the one that was dead by itself.
Sometimes I may restart my Schumacher on its automatic trickle setting several times before the “%charge” indicator on it stabilizes at the most the battery has left. I go through that process whether it’s a bank of batteries or a single battery and it does usually seem to help bring the %charge up over several cycles. Maybe it’s just a defect in the logic of the charge controller that makes it shut down before the battery has reached the final best state of charge it has the ability to take. Maybe it’s desulfating the battery and that’s why several cycles work better.
Edited by ccjersey 9/2/2024 19:56
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Multiple battery charging ideas
