Hi Guy,
(Interesting, and nice writing, BTW)
I share your experience with batteries, only from the Bell side of
things. We ran the major switching centers you described.
We had individual cells that held 50 gallons of acid in each cell. A
graph was kept for each cell. They lasted many years.
My reply is addressing your comments *_only_* about 'floating' lead acid
batteries on the 12 volt line.
Yes, you are correct with your statements about using a three step
charging process for best charge. I have been using a
lead acid boat battery floating across my 12V DC line to allow me to
quickly end a qso, and properly shut down my K3
during a power outage. Most of the time the outage is short and I can
resume my qso as if nothing happened.
I do not otherwise discharge/recharge it. (My concern is hydrogen gas).
Yes, a UPS can work. I trust this arrangement more.
A deep cycle boat battery is intended for charge/dis-charge cycles
repeatedly. It sometimes stays in a discharged state for hours or days
in high heat or cold before getting recharged again at a single step
rate. Despite these conditions, they last pretty well but decline
gradually.
A deep cycle boat battery may be overkill for me if I don't intend to
operate with it, but who knows what could happen?
Once again about lead acid batteries, if optimum is the goal, then I
think the biggest thing we lack in our consumer
batteries today is not being able to monitor or charge individual cells.
I prefer cells with removable caps for maintenance also.
How else can one tell what the specific gravity is, or the electrolyte
level? I can remember when car batteries
had the bus exposed so we could read the individual cell voltages. It
was common practice to apply a 'boost-charge'
to a weak cell to bring the voltage up. I hate to see all the batteries
becoming 'maintenance free'. But DSFDF.
Dick, n0ce
On 7/15/2016 5:38 AM, Guy Olinger K2AV wrote:
My first encounter with the rather complex issues of battery floating and
discharge were with AT&T Long Lines in the 60's, where we had such things
as 10,000 ampere 12 VDC supplies for many thousands of tube filaments, with
delta 440 AC driving huge motor generators in parallel, and strings of low
gravity 2' x 2' x 5' single cell batteries floating across the discharge
bus, and end cells to switch into the string to maintain 12 volts as the
batteries went into their normal discharge curves.
Carelessness in the battery room could get you burned, blinded, possibly
killed. Also having a major switching center go down because of batteries
in Washington, DC, could get one in a lot of trouble with various branches
of government. We had Bell Laboratories, Bell System Practices, and lots of
management in our ear all the time about how to do the batteries. Zero
tolerance for battery screw-ups, for any reason.
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