Posted by Sherman in Idaho [72.47.153.112] on Thursday, February 13, 2014 at 20:52:20 :
In Reply to: battery storage? need input! posted by John in Utah [166.70.201.2] on Thursday, February 13, 2014 at 17:57:42 :
I'm bad at letting batteries sit in rigs and go dead. Now that a basic battery is almost $100, I'm trying to improve my habits, but with so many rigs in various places, it's hard to keep them all plugged in. You're right that once they go below 50% charge, they're never really the same again, even if you do recharge them. Each deep discharge takes a good chunk of life out of it.
Pretty much any low-current power supply putting out less than an smp can be left on a conventional battery more or less forever without hurting anything. I'm trying to keep more of them in the garage for the winter, where I have a low-current DC power supply adjusted to 13.8 volts, with about 6 pairs of charger clips attached to it so I can just set all the batteries on the floor (no it doesn't hurt them to set on the floor) and hook them all up to the same charger. You can keep a battery on a 13.8 volt float forever. One of the many nice things about flooded lead-acid batteries compared to newer technologies is they don't need any sort of fancy charging procedure unless you're trying to push a lot of charge into them in a short time. Small solar panels are also good for keeping a battery charged (but not for charging a dead one) if the rig is in a sunny place, too far from an outlet, and the panel won't get covered with snow for the winter.