Wednesday, Feb 08, 2006 at 17:20
Here's a bit of practical experience from a boat. I had two unused 130AH Trojan's but one was about 2 years younger than the other. Both were maintained.
I did parallel them up to run a small Engel fridge plus the few boat electrics. Charging was from 44W solar panel + a 30Amp DC only genny on many days when the voltage was getting low.
This was intermittant heavy use, totalling maybe 6-8 weeks/year, the rest of the time the batteries were trickle charged when the boat was parked.
The batteries lasted not very long, I guess one of them never got fully charged as it died before the other, got maybe 2 years use out of it, the other lasted another year.
In my experience these batteries take a very long time to fully charge once they have been run down to 50% or so. Certainly, running the tank dry on the genny (about 3 hours) did not do the job, part of the problem being the genny's regulator cutting back the charge from full 30A to 1/3rd or less after a short time. These batteries apparently preferred to be slow charged or having some kind of smarter charger instead the one my Honda genny has built in.
I also found that my Trojans were rather thirsty despite being fed with
well regulated charge inputs. I now use sealed ACdelco's and had no problem so far (4 years).
Klaus
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