Quote:
Originally Posted by MetroMPG
Poor Daox. Ask a simple question....
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lol seriously, wow... I know there are better ways to do this guys. I just wanted an answer on the parallel battery question.
Thanks for the links Metro. Thats kind of what I figured. The larger capacity batteries will try to charge the smaller ones. I don't really see this as bad as I'm still increasing capacity and that is the goal.
Mctimson, length of coast isn't the problem. The engine off time is. Near the last leg of my trip I have a relatively short, but slow 25 mph zone I go through. Its slightly downhill and I probably keep my engine off for quite a while. I never timed it, but its between 30 seconds and a minute I'd think. On Wednesday I EOCed almost as much as I normally would with the headlights off. I think I cycled my battery down to 11.4V during that segment just to see how low it would get. Multiple times during the trip I was down into the mid 11V range. That is not good and will kill a battery pretty fast.
Anyway, last night I hooked up the two additional batteries in parallel. Guess what, it worked. My battery voltages were much more stable. As you'd expect, the voltage dropped slower. It also went up slower which is to be expected. The lowest voltage I saw on my trip in today was 11.9V. It did take a while for the batteries to build up a charge though. They all started out at 12.2V because they weren't all fully charged (my fault, I was rushed last night). So, I still needed to do engine on coasting to get their charge up initially, but after they were charged up a bit things went smoothly. The trip home tonight (no headlights) should give them their first good charge though.
