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Old 03-05-2012, 04:46 PM   #16
timjet
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Join Date: Apr 2009
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RE: Big Battery Charger

Thanks Ron.

From my research you are correct, mixing wet cell and AGM's is OK because the bulk and float charges are very close. No so with*Gel Cell's

I'm still trying to decide on a battery charger. There are some pretty cheap ones out there that I don't think will hold up in a marine environment.

I have a 30 amp 3 bank Charles battery charger and wonder if I can incorporate this into my future setup. I'm thinking of moving all my house batteries to one battery bank, that;s 4 AGM with a total of 440 AH, buy a charger for these batteries and use the current 30 amp Charles charger to charge the gen start and engine start batteries which are on separate banks.

I think I still need a 100 amp charger or one close to that capacity if I don't want to run the genset for hours. Using 150 amps every 12 hrs would require an hour and a half gen run time with a 100 amp charger. Actually it's much longer than that because from what a tech at Magnum said AGM's will take 100% charge until 80% full then the AGM's acceptance charge falls off rapidily, like a wet cell.* BD has mentioned that AGM acceptance rate is 100% until full. Which ever is true I can accept an 80% charge which should take an hour.
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