Re: (ET) 12 volts (was mounting a rotarty invertor?)

["David Roden" <etpost drmm net>]

On 31 Aug 2006 at 20:31, David C Robie wrote:

> With the 'series
> parallel 12' scheme, a shorted cell drags everything down by 2 volts and 
> the
> charger works overtime, never tapers down and overcharges the heck out 
> of the
> rest of them. 

Agreed, this is a danger.  I've had that happen in other applications.  
You 
just have to monitor your batteris.

> 12's are also built 'cheaply' in many cases more for profit by
> the dealer than for load carrying capacity. 

No doubt, but the ones I use are not cheapies nor are they SLI (car) 
batteries.  They're high quality gel type.  These are admittedly not high 
current batteries, but they are very well made, consistent products.  I 
would not recommend that anyone use cheap generic flooded marine batteries 
for much of anything except >maybe< a trolling motor.

As I've posted here before, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this setup to 
other ETers.  I use East Penn 8G24s in series-parallel because I happened 
to 
have a large quantity of them on hand.  For most people ordinary golf car 
batteries are a better choice, and in fact I would not have these if I'd 
had 
to pay full price for them. ;-)  

If you want a golf car battery that you don't have to water, East Penn 
does 
make one in this same range of gel batteries.  Although I haven't tried 
them, every indication is that they are good products.  But they are much 
more expensive than regular flooded GC batteries - and remember that 
you'll 
destroy gel batteries in short order if you try to charge them with that 
blunderbuss GE charger.

I have had about 8 years of good service from these batteries so far.  
YMMV.


David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA

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