I think Damon's point about the charge times is really good. You really
won't save a lot of time over charging them individually unless you have
some monster charger that has way too much capacity for a single
battery. And as he said, the connectors would be a pain to deal with;
the right sized connectors are going to be bulky.
If you are determined to use a single charger how about this:
Leave all the heavy series connections in place. Bring a wire out from
each battery junction (including the ends of course) to a single
connector. This can be reasonably sized wire. A mating connector
attaches to a rotary switch (manual changeover) or relays (automated
operation) which then connects to the charger. You could manually or
automatically switch the charger based on time (ok) or on voltage (much
better).
- SteveS
damon henry wrote:
This will work, and probably work fairly well, but is a lot of work,
and will take a loooong time to charge. One thing you need to keep in
mind is that when you put two batteries in parrallel their capacity
becomes the sum of the two batteries, so if you put 6 12 volt
batteries in parallel and they each have 50 ahrs of capacity you now
have one 12 volt 300 ahr battery. If you have a battery charger that
can dish out 300 amps you can charge in about one hour, 30 amps ~10
hours, 10 amps ~ 30 hours. Also remember that each of your Anderson
connectors will be seeing full discharge current, and will need to be
rated appropriately. If you use the smaller connectors they will melt.
I personally would not do this. It actually ends up being more
complicated, and it would drive me nuts to redo the connections every
time I go from charging to riding and vice versa. You can almost
always charge fastest by leaving batteries in series, so that is what
I do at least through the bulk phase. The largest drawback to
charging this way is that towards the end of charge the individual
batteries do not get the individual treatment they require. You
overcome this problem either by turning the charge current way down at
the end of charge so the stragglers can catch up while not hurting the
batteries that are already full, or by disconnecting the series
charger and topping off with individual chargers, or as you have
descrbed putting them all in parallel to finish them off.
damon
