Doug Dotson wrote:
Not sure where you got all the dire advise. The charging
regimine for wet cells and AGM are about the same. Putting
gels in the mix is not a good idea.

Doug
s/v Callista

Sure, and what about the golf cart he stole from his wife? Surely she
deserves some sympathy, even from we non-golfers?


"Larry W4CSC" wrote in message
...
Because someone emailed me to ask about how I was getting along with
having 330 AH golf cart wetcells paralleled with the red AGM
starting batteries in my stepvan's diesel V-8 I thought I'd answer
to the newsgroup, too, with my personal experience.

Since November of 2002, I have had two 6V 330AH golf cart batteries
powering my work bench and a 500W Tripplite inverter in my 1998
Union City Body/Chevy stepvan. The van came with two paralleled AGM
starting batteries, brand new complements of the taxpayers from its
former owner, the USAF. To separate the batteries when the van is
parked for long periods, while allowing me to crank the diesel if
these odd batteries failed, I added a simple 350A single-pole on-off
switch from Guest?...it's a boat battery switch.

For a while, every time I started the truck, I'd switch the switch
to on after the truck started and switch the switch off when I
stopped the truck engine because of all the scaremongering about
parallelling AGM and wet batteries I'd read and heard from all over.
After a while, after I'd forgotten to switch the switch and nothing
untoward happened (no blast, fire, dead batteries, molten cabling,
etc.) many times, I opened the switch one day and put a DC ammeter
across the switch so I could see all this dastardly current that
would flow from AGM super batteries to my trusty old wetcells with
the big, thick plates. Curiously, the ammeter read zero. I
couldn't get any cross-battery current until I got down to the 29.99
MILLIAMP range when I measured a tiny 18ma flowing from the nasty
old golf cart batteries actually CHARGING the supercells, against
everything that's Holy!

Well, the switch is ON, tonight, just like it is every night, now.
Nothing melted. All the batteries are still perfect. I'd switch it
off if I were going away for a few days to months, just for safety.
But, against all the hype and bull****, paralleled, they are just
fine....(c;

Your reporter in the kevlar vest,
Larry

--
Remove "nospam" from return address.