Wayne.B wrote in
:

On a boat however, the house bank routinely gets deeply discharged,
often to as low as 50% of capacity. To replace that amount of power
as quickly as possible, 3 stage charging is required.



I'll take the bait.....

In the yard out front is a Chevy-based diesel stepvan, made for you
taxpayers by Union City Body in TN for the Air Force. When I bought it,
I added two L-16H deep cycle beasts in a custom-made box in the driver's
footwell, a useless space. The van is my electronics shop and has two
500W Tripplite inverters to run lighting, equipment, etc. It also has a
60A supply to two 400W bridged audio power amps I use in the DJ Biz where
there is no available AC and we don't want the Honda 3000i genset noise.

It gets deep cycled, regularly, and has for a couple of years. They're
regular golf cart batteries, not some exotic $800 AGM. There are two
AGMs in parallel the government installed to crank the 6.2L GM diesel V-8
up under the hood. One of them melted when the guaze shorted out and
Batteries Plus replaced it with another one that didn't cost me much.

Between the house batteries and the starting batteries is a 250A Guest
ON-OFF switch that simply parallels all the battery banks for charging
off the ordinary, everyday, 80A, Delco, internally-regulated alternator
on the GM diesel beast.

IF I have AC power, I charge them all, again in parallel, with the
unregulated, simple 40A AC charger Cap'n Geoffrey gave me off the Amel
when he installed an automatic Guest charger to replace it. The Amel
charger is simply a tapped transformer, a 50A rectifier with a switch
that selects "Low" "Medium or "High" on 115 or 230VAC, changing the tap
arrangement for the various countries and guestimated loads. It has 3
stage charging! You start on HIGH then downshift, if you think about it,
to MEDIUM or LOW when the gravity comes up...(c; You wouldn't want it,
like he didn't, because it has no shutoff when the cells are charged.

Those silly L-16Hs have just wonderful gravity readings and can run the
whole DJ station, computers/monitors/preamps/processors/big power amps
for just hours and hours......and have for years.

And I don't have a $4000 charger to keep them that way. What nonsense.