This week didn't go as I had hoped because our driveway was filled with trucks from the local Oil company installing new heaters and plumbing in our house, but I did get a few things done. I went for my inspection, and passed easily with no confusion, did more work on my heater setup and found out how to properly equalize batteries.
I found out that many chargers WILL NOT equalize lead acid batteries. After oodles of research and playing around, I have discovered that my MAXX29 need 1 hour of Equalizing for every 25 cycles. I have found that after 50 cycles, the batteries TANK in performance, which is what happened to me last year and I just replaced the pack.
Now I have been experimenting with one left over MAXX29 that I kept as a practice battery and for camping use. I removed it from my EV back in September and have used it about 20 time since then for various things. I have a Home Depot Smart Charger that always detects "sulfation" on the and goes into FLOAT instead of fully charging the battery because of that.
I decided to investigate proper Equalization and found that it needs 15.5 volts +/- temperature compensation. So I took a spare IBM laptop charger and created an Equalizer and tried it last night. Well it worked! After equalizing I put on a 25 AMP load (Inverter on with a house fan), drained the battery and gave it another charge and the charger registered "FULL". Then, this afternoon I put on the same load and the battery had a lot less voltage sag, and is registering as almost new! It has about 60 cycles on it and should get another hours worth of equalization to be brought up to specs.
I have two batteries in my EV that were showing the same symptoms, so I put on my Equalizer for and hour each, drove the EV 4.8 miles and saw significant improvement, but I don't expect to see the real improvement until this charge finishes.
I think I am going to write a paper on working with these batteries....
