house batteries

Hello Mick'n'Jen,

Stuart already mentioned the importance of fully recharging your batteries before the next nightly discharge session.

Don't rely on the alternator alone.
Alternator charging is only good for applications requiring float charging like your starter battery (cranking your engine only consumes less than 0.5Ah of charge).
Compare this with the typical overnight fridge/lights drain of 20 or 25Ah and it becomes clear why this is called a 'cyclic' application.

Cyclic apps require a higher charging voltage, regardless of the battery type involved.

That's where your 25A charger comes in handy.

Use it in connection with your generator to boost charge your batteries at the 14.4V setting.
Let it charge for 1 to 1.5 hours minimum which'll bring the state of charge up to around 95%.

Ideally, you would then have a medium sized (60 to 80 Watts to give you some extra for powering the fridge during the day) solar panel topping off the charge at the float voltage setting of 13.6V during the remainder of a sunny day.
Any el cheapo solar regulator will achieve this for you.

That way the batteries will be fully charged between each discharge cycle.
FYI, it won't hurt to apply a one hour 15.5V equalisation charging stage every 2 to 4 weeks, to keep the cells balanced inside your wet cell batteries.

Best regards, Peter

Hullo Mick 'n' Jen
Good advice above
We have 3 Delcos as house batteries in the boat + one as the starting battery. So far they have survived nearly 9 years of abuse and are still going OK. The trick is in the charging, as stated above. When away sailing, I make sure that every third day we motor sail so as to bring the charge back up. This is done with a manual system so that we can bulk charge at 14.8v until the input current per battery drops to <2 amps. We then drop it back to 13.6v float. At anchor, we use a 60w solar panel to supplement.
Rgds
Andrew

Thanks guys, the process i have in place is that after camping for a few days i see that my batteries are down so i kick the geny in the guts plug in the ctex put it on NORMAL charge mode it takes a few hours to go through all the stages then it indicates that the batteries are charged, i stop the geny, do the same in a couple of days. The problem i had with on of the batteries is that it started spewing acid out the side of the battery in the middle of oz. i rang acdelco they said yeh take it in ,the only place in the NT is in Darwin that’s handy when you are not going any where near the joint, by the time i got there it was out of warranty so you can guess what happened next.
Is this procedure not correct ?

if your battery has started to leak from anywhere there is a problem, most delco batteries come with a 2 year warranty unless in ataxi or truck.