Dear Skippers,
I am soliciting your help with a problem I am having with my Sterling Pro
Charger Ultra that is about 3 years old. It is a 60 amp 12VDC unit. The unit works in ‘open-flooded-lead acid’ mode and does a fine job of keeping my 6 12V
batteries charged. My house bank consists of 3 group 31
batteries in parallel with 2 group 27 batteries. (I plan to replace them with 5 matched cells in the very near future.) A
single group 27 start
battery is used to start the auxiliary
engine. All the batteries are open lead acid and are about 3 or 4 years old and have
lost significant capacity. The batteries are probably heavily sulfated since I have never equalized them. The batteries, when topped up and being floated typically accept about 0.3 amps of
current. There are no abnormally hot cells to make me suspect internal shorts. The batteries are mounted in the
engine room of my
boat which is kept in
Florida. It is no surprise that they are in need of replacing. During the past 10 years I’ve typically had to replace the batteries every 3 years or so; again, not surprising.
Now for the problem: I can’t get the
charger into de-sulfate mode. When I follow the instructions in the manual, partially inserted below, I cannot get the charger out of open lead-acid mode and into de-sulfate mode. The manual says that if I hold the setup button for 10 secs or more,
LED lights will start to flash, enabling me to toggle the de-sulfate LED light so that it too lights up and starts to flash. Once the de-sulfate LED is flashing, pressing the up and down arrows simultaneously should cause the de-sulfate LED to go solid which would indicate that the charger is in de-sulfate mode. I cannot get the
LED lights to flash no matter how long I hold down the setup button. What am I doing wrong? Has anyone else had this problem? I don’t want to buy 6 matched cells if I can’t break them in by equalizing them first. By following
Maine Sails advice (aka RC) and equalizing my new batteries once a month, I hope to get an extra year or two out of new matched batteries.
Help would be greatly appreciated.
Ralph