Hi Jay, This has happened to me personally, and to other customers I have dealt with over the years. In my case, I got my hands on (4) used Interstate Workaholic L16 batteries. I was unable to achieve an acceptable SG because the voltage would not climb above 14V (using 20A charger). I used a clamp-on DC amp meter to verify a full 20A going into the batteries, but the voltage would not climb any higher. It was as if energy was being lost within the batteries. When I separated the bank into sets of two, the ratio of current-to-capacity was improved and I was able to equalize the daylights out of them, and eventually recovered their performance. I have heard of the condition where the battery has low SOC, and the charger causes the voltage to increase very quickly, but I cannot definitely attribute that to sulfation. It sounds more like an internal open circuit condition. I do know it usually results in the need to replace the batteries. Rgds _____________________________________________________________________________________
Eric Bentsen | Schneider Electric | Solar Business | UNITED STATES | Technical Support Representative Phone: +(650) 351-8237 ext. 001# | Email: [email protected] | Site: www.schneider-electric.com/solar | Address: 250 South Vasco Rd., Livermore, CA 94551 *** Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail From: jay peltz <[email protected]> To: RE-wrenches <[email protected]> Date: 07/23/2013 07:33 PM Subject: Re: [RE-wrenches] Tri-Star MPPT Sent by: [email protected] Hi Eric, While agree with most all your assessments, Can you please elaborate on the "sulfation causes the voltage not to climb?" This is quite counter to what I have seen and what the battery people say? Thanks Jay Peltz power Sent from my iPad On Jul 23, 2013, at 2:48 PM, [email protected] wrote: Hi William, If the SG was 1.26, of course the battery voltage would increase quickly to >30V (which is high for warm weather, BTW). It has been my experience that sulfation causes the voltage NOT to climb. Especially when you have a very large bank, and a relatively small amount of solar. Sometimes it is necessary to reduce the bank size into smaller sets to equalize them and recover their performance. This method of reducing bank size is also effective to compare performance and weed out a potentially bad battery. Systems that have a lot of capacity, with a relatively small amount of charge current usually creates problems, because the load demand exceeds solar production. This results in batteries that operate with partial SOC, which is when sulfation is most prevalent. With (8) L16s, you have approx 800Ahrs of capacity (24V bank). It would take significantly more than 8A of charge current to properly care for a bank that size. Rgds, _____________________________________________________________________________________ Eric Bentsen | Schneider Electric | Solar Business | UNITED STATES | Technical Support Representative Phone: +(650) 351-8237 ext. 001# | Email: [email protected] | Site: www.schneider-electric.com/solar | Address: 250 South Vasco Rd., Livermore, CA 94551 ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the Symantec Email Security.cloud service. ______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ List sponsored by Home Power magazine List Address: [email protected] Change email address & settings: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/options.cgi/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org List-Archive: http://lists.re-wrenches.org/pipermail/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org List rules & etiquette: www.re-wrenches.org/etiquette.htm Check out participant bios: www.members.re-wrenches.org
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