Your time-tested brick & mortar battery charging & maintenance unit?

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Mike.C

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Sep 23, 2015
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Rockville, MD
So I'm new at this and am learning all the time, which is part of the fun. Last week, discovering we had the wrong kind of battery, and it was stone dead besides, was less fun, but the time since has been educational.  ::)

We now own a group 27 600 CCA deep cycle marine/RV weight training opportunity.

Recognizing there will be times when we're away from the RV for a few weeks or possibly longer, we want to take it home and make sure we have a system for keeping it topped up. Many multi-stage chargers seem kinda underpowered for this (2 amps, etc.).

I'm not sure how many amps are needed for this job. What do you use?

Thanks--Mike.
 
Battery Tender Plus, which is 1.25 amps. That's enough for maintaining a charged battery, which is the goal.
 
Thanks HW...yes, that's part of the goal, but we also envision scenarios where the thing gets depleted after some time not hooked up. I also see advice to the effect that discharging the battery (not necessarily to 50%) is good for it. Mark Polk writes:

"Reducing the battery?s depth of discharge will increase the life of the battery. A battery discharged to 50 percent every day (50 percent capacity remaining) will last twice as long as it would if it?s cycled to 80 percent (20 percent capacity remaining)."

Then I guess it would be just a question of how fast we need it recharged, right? If we had a couple weeks, the 2 amp would be fine, but if we needed it overnight, not so much?
 
I'm certainly not an expert on battery charging but just about any battery I've ever had to charge charged up full overnight on 2 amp charge.  I've always heard the slower the better.
 
Battery Tender here too. I have used mine to charge a nearly dead garden tractor battery, but it's not intended to actually charge batteries.
 
I don't have one of those fancy shmancy 3 stage chargers, but what I do have, is an old 10 amp charger, and a battery tender Jr.. I would charge the battery for several hours with the 10 amp charger, and when the charging current dropped form 8 to 10 amps, to 2 to 3 amps, I would switch it over to the maintainer and let it go until I needed it. For an interesting read about batteries and chargers, google handybobsolar.
 
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