Adding a second battery charger

[Sulaire]

Due to various reasons I find myself with 2 sterling pro ultra chargers (50 amp each).

One is already fitted to the boat and working great. I have a second one now and since I have 630 amp house bank plus 70 amp starter linked to a 225amp windlass/thruster battery with an ACR, i thought it would be good to fit the second charger into the system making a total of 100amps charging potential.

I would wire one charger soley to the house bank , (bridging all outputs together), then the second chargerwith two outputs, one to the house bank and one to the charger battery/windlass etc...(again bridging unused third outputon the charger).

Does this make sense ? Am I missing anything safety wise?

Is ther anything I need to allow for when connecting two chargers to one bank ( also have solar and wind going to house! )

We live onboard and if we use the generator to charge due to cloudy days, using these two chargers would mean less running time ?
.?
Charlie.

[Waltthesalt]

Some thoughts: If your second charger is charging both banks you'd do best with a VSR relay so that it opens when the lower AMPHr bank is charged. Don't want to use a diode for this because of the voltage drop across it. An alternative is to have a voltage regulator like a duo charger that applies the charge to the banks. As for the solar and wind chargers, the big advantage here is that engine chargers are good when at a healthy charging rate, in the early part of the charging cycle, but when that tapers off you're operating at a very low load. That's where the solar and wind chargers are in thier best form. Lower amps but for a longer time. An amp-hour meter can be a good help on this. Bogart Engineering, trimetric meters, used to have a good write-up on how this works.

[Andina Marie]

Yes your plan should work. Make sure that the charging current on either battery does not exceed the maximum rating of the ACR so if one battery is fully charged and all the current is going through the ACR to the other bank it is not overloaded.

You should be able to cut charging time in half and the increased load on the genset is more efficient and good for the diesel engine.

[btrayfors]

The Sterling ProUltra is an excellent battery charger. I've tested them in my shop, and installed them on client's boats.

One of the nice features they have is the ability to chain two of them together to increase total charging output.

That's what I'd do, since if you use the second one to charge only a portion of your batteries, you may not be getting full potential.

I'd just chain the two of them together and get the full potential.

Bill

[Sulaire]

Hi


When you say chain them together, do you mean just as I described?

C.