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Battery charging, have I got this right?
Makes me kinda glad for my little honda generator. Been there where the
wind died and drifting for shoals...batteries were too dead to start the diesel. Went to start the Honda...found the end of my shorepower cable (connecting the honda to the boat ) came off..here I am rewiring is before I can charge the battery, before I can start the engine. Fun. Glenn. s/v Seawing www.seawing.net "Larry" wrote in message ... Dave wrote in : OK, so I've been using the house battery and run it down pretty low. I now want to start the engine and charge both batteries. Is your suggestion the I start the engine on the starting battery, run it a bit, shut it down, switch to both batteries and the complete the charging? Naw....Put 'er in BOTH, crank the engine, and run it. Sure there's going to be current from the starting battery to the dead house batteries for a few seconds until you hit the starter and draw everyone's voltage down below 11, but it'll make no difference, whatsoever. As soon as the engine cranks, the alternator's load will be very heavy on the house batteries for a few minutes hauling them up to 12V when the voltage starts causing charging current, instead of the discharging current that's been going on since you threw the switch to BOTH, but that won't hurt it any more than cranking a dead car with another car and a pair of jumper cables...same circuit. I always get a kick out of watching people in a panic quickly disconnecting the jumper cables the instant the dead car starts as if something is going to explode! How silly. Let the alternator of the cranking car help give a boost charge current to the dead battery before disconnecting it. If one alternator has a higher voltage limit, it won't matter as long as there's a dead battery in parallel...loading the hell out of both of them. I think a lot of these tales about blown alternators, parallel batteries, etc., goes way back into the generator days with the vibrating mechanical voltage regulators rapidly pulsing the generator fields on and off. The old generators didn't like it when the battery circuit opened as the voltage regulators weren't made to just shut down, entirely, and the generators, themselves, would run away from their own stored magnetism, overvoltaging the hell out of everything! The solid state regulator simply shuts down the field current, all the way to zero if necessary. It's not rocket science, nor some Wicca curse. |
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