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From: Arild Jensen (no email)
Date: Fri Nov 28 2003 - 23:37:26 EST
-----Original Message-----
Jim Fidler wrote:
Also, can you give us a thorough comment about the West
Marine battery combiners, based on your experiences?
REPLY
Sorry but I do not have any personal experience with the West Marine brand
combiner.
However, I have experimented with the Xantrex brand of combiner.
Based on that testing I would say the concept is good and they should work well.
What I did notice is that when two very different sized banks are combined
with these devices, some design factors must be considered.
If you connect the charging source to the smaller of the two batteries then the
voltage will rapidly rise as the bulk charge fills up that battery.
When the threshold voltage is reached the combiner closes.
At that point if the other and bigger bank is also very depleted, the smaller
battery discharges into the large and the sensed voltage may well drop below the
disconnect point. This effect may cycle many times before the bigger battery
is recharged enough to keep the combiner closed.
For this reason, I recommend that the charging source be connected to the
larger of the two battery banks.
Unfortunately this poses other problems.
When you have a large inverter connected to the house bank and twin engine
alternators connected to the their respective start bank, some compromises are
needed. In such installations you might want to consider having the one engine
alternator feeding both start batteries ( if you have twin engine) and the other
engine is then fitted with a high output alternator for charging the house bank.
If you have well maintained engines, there is no reason why you cannot use one
bank to start both engines. In which case you do not need a combiner to join
both start banks together. However you do need to have a combiner to recharge
the start battery from the inverter/charger unless that unit happens to have an
echo charger or some other auxiliary output for a second battery.
Combiners work best when they join batteries of approximately similar capacity
and they are discharged somewhat equally.
If you use a combiner to joint a severely depleted bank with a fully or nearly
full charged bank then there will be a large short duration current flow as
the two banks equalize. In some cases this current flow will exceed the
ampacity of a 50 amp combiner.
Perhaps Andina can tell us if there has been any tests done to determine
contact burn under these loading conditions.
Regards
Arild
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