Tuesday, Mar 28, 2006 at 22:45
Sand Man, I supply both caravan and motor
home manufactures and none of my customers use them. Thats not to say they aren’t being used but their benefits are limited to a very small portion of the market.
As pointed out, once the total battery capacity is 100 a/h or more, these devices are of very little advantage and then only where the battery bank has only been partially discharged.
An example, if a 200 a/h wet cell battery is discharged down to around 11 volts and then a 14 volt charge is applied, the battery can easily draw over 60 amps initially and over the next 4 hours will eventually drop to around 10 amp. These figures are based on experiments we have carried out on equipment we regularly work with.
The first hours charging drops the current draw to about 50 amps. The step up would take at least 2.5 hours to replace the same capacity.
It’s only when the battery has only had a small discharge that the step up will charge the battery to full charge quicker and then is still only a marginal improvement.
For the cost of one of these things, it would a greater advantage and a far cheaper cost to simply add another battery. At the end of the day you would have a much greater stored capacity, achieve in a much shorter time than these things could ever do.
And last but not least, most of these things are not very efficient so you are wasting power while using them.
Good quality high amp units that actually work, have a starting price of around $600 or $700
FollowupID:
418269