"Smart" Battery Chargers

[a64pilot]

Just about nothing that is automatic is best, almost everything that allows manual manipulation by a trained person is better, take Radar for example, default automatic is pretty good, but if you have experience you can manually tweak it and get a better result.

Your Outback doesn’t drop to float at the perfect time either, you can get it kinda sorta close by programming, but if you want it to drop right at the perfect end amps, you need to buy a Flexnet DC and a Hub, then you can program end amps apparently

[sailorboy1]

You know what? I don’t really care about endless arguing over small details. You guys want to win it is fine by me. After all I’m just a fat man living in my parents
basement in Ohio somewhere.

[Delfin]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

You will have to turn it off and on at least once to get to full.
There is some charging in float voltage, but it’s slow. All chargers I am familiar with drop to float prematurely, it must be some kind of protection scheme to drop to float when close to full and let the batteries finish under float voltage.

Having said that Solar can really confuse any “automatic” charger, it can easily make a battery appear to be more charged than it is.

My Magnum can be set to drop to float at a set end amps, so can my outback 80 with additional parts.
However even the Magnum can be confused by Solar, if bank voltage is above a certain voltage it won’t go to absorption voltage, but float and Solar can of course raise the banks voltage above that certain point making the bank appear as if it’s almost fully charged when it’s not.
I can trick the Magnum by programming it make it drop to absorption voltage temporarily.

I’d like to have a simple switch that absorption voltage one way and float the other and let me control it, but as far as I know this simple thing doesn’t exist. I’d really particularly like it for the alternator.
Mark Grasser’s old regulators had a “force to float” switch that you could flip and of course force it to float, but so far as I can find no one else’s does.

Years ago a friend had what I recall was a "Spa" brand manual regulator. Just a dial you could turn to regulate alternator output. Probably an easy way to cook your batteries, but having reset a "smart" regulator to get it to keep charging enough times, I kind of wish they still made them.

[john61ct]

Transpo 911-02R, 14 - 20V

Mechman and Excessive rebadge them

[Delfin]

Originally Posted by john61ct

Transpo 911-02R, 14 - 20V

Mechman and Excessive rebadge them

Completely useless, unless floating your battery at 14v seems right.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Stu Jackson

... I wrote an article on it, The Gotcha Algorithm, and he (Maine Sail) did one as well...

An excellent discussion at the Catalina 34 Forum.
“Link-series Charging Algorithms -- The "Gotcha" Factor!” ~ by Stu Jackson
➥ https://c34.org/bbs/index.php/topic,...html%5b/url%5d

See also "How Does a Heart Interface Link 2000 Work?” ➥ http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...ml#post2869649