Quote:
Originally Posted by Stu Jackson
How did your test work out?
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Here is what I have found and observed after making some changes to the link 1000 and Freedom 15 charger.
First, I changed the charge parameters to 1% threshold and a minimum voltage of 14.2.
I personally felt that still allowing the link to realize its full based on amps going in was still valuable, but agreed that the 13.2 default value is way too low. But setting it at 15 basically removes it entirely from the calculation, which didn't seem to necessarily be correct either.
We drained our batteries down to about 11.5V, way lower then we would even normally do, but since they are new (3 months old), and have never been cycled yet, figured I would do this based on recommendations to "break-in" the batteries a bit. This equated to about 500aH being drained off the the 660aH bank (assuming the link was calibrated correctly with the batteries).
We then charged the batteries. We are in the
Caribbean, and have a temp
sensor also connected from the Freedom to the battery bank. However, what I noticed, was that because of this, and with the batteries
heating up, the Freedom started to regulate the voltage down to about 13.7 or so. I didnt feel this was high enough. Ambient temp is about 80-85 right now. So, I disabled the temp
sensor, manually set the temp to 80 on the Link 1000, and monitored the battery temp by feel to make sure things didnt get too hot. The voltage then went back up to about 14.3-14.4 to do the bulk charge. That seemed ok to me.
This took a long time. It eventually got into absorption mode, and then eventually I saw it go into float mode. However, I knew 2 things, the aH count was well over the 0, more like about 175, and the charged params also had not been met as the last time I checked it was still putting in about 24 amps into the bank. Not sure why this happened, maybe some sort of timer override is the only thing I could think of. So, I reset the charger, and it then went to absorption phase and started again to put in the 23 amps. This continued for a number of hours. The amps did decrease, but VERY slowly. Probably not even a 1amp decrease in an hour.
The other thing was I had never equalized the 6 batteries when we received them as we live at
anchor and have no charge source to do this with. So I decided to cut short the charge a bit, and equalize the batteries for about 6 hours. I did turn the temp sensor back on for this step, and let it run for the 6 hours. This also reset the aH count to 0 once a negative load was sensed on the Link 1000.
Next day, put a load of 20amp-60amp on for about 8 hours. Drained about 300aH out of the battery bank.
Started the charge cycle again.
This time everything proceeded as I would expect, and the amps eventually dropped down to < 1% at the 14.35 volts, and the charger went into float mode.
I have since drained 1 aH from the bank, and turned the charger back on to see the behavior.
What I have found is the the aH counter will go > 0. So, i do not think that the Link will go to float mode based on the aH counter going to 0 as mentioned. But, the aH will go down to 5-6amps to keep the battery at 14.2-14.25, which will trigger the link to go to float.
So, my conclusions are that yes indeed the parameters need to be changed for the link to
record and track accurately, but I dont think that setting the voltage to 15, and disabling this feature, is necessarily a good idea as I dont know what will cause the link to reset to float mode. But, changing the paramters to 1% and 14.2 as also suggested on this thread, seems like a very useful change.
Thanks everyone for their input and suggestions!