Battery Secret

 After years of living off-grid with batteries, I've had my share of battery
problems. Most recently I found a bad connection in one of my parallel
strings that caused the other parallel string to become over used and fail.
I now have a solution to eliminating this problem.

I bought an AC-DC clamp-on ammeter from Sears. I now regularly check the
current in each string during charge and discharge cycles. I've found that
strings can get miss-matched. This can be corrected by rearranging the
batteries to make matched strings. Short of putting a separate shunt in each
string, the clamp meter is the only way to easily match up your strings.

DC clampmeters are a bit rare and hard to find but a few places have them
for a reasonable price.

Its nice to have a happy battery bank where all cells are doing their fair
share of the work.

Enjoy!

NM

  Hey, this may be way far out, but how about just getting as many cheap
compasses as you have parallel banks, then making mounts that hold them
exactly as high above a conductor for each bank as needed to give them
all the same deflection when they are charging correctly?  That way, you
could just glance at the row of compasses and if any one was different
from the rest, you's know you had an issue to resolve and where it was.

Pete Stanaitis
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~~NoMad~~ wrote:

 Interesting idea but it wouldn't work for me. My batteries are in a
motorhome where I live full time and travel around. Moving the rig would
require recalibrating all the compasses. Even the DC clamp meter I have
needs to be manually zeroed every time I use it to compensate for the
earth's magnetic field and temperature variations. I'm still waiting for
someone to make batteries with a computer chip built into each cell that
monitors cell parameters and sends the data to my computer.

Nowadays storing electrical energy is still just a PITA!

NM

 

Hey amigo Petit... I have never heard of battery generating magnetic
field, also how is your cable going to generate magnetic field if you have
no iron core amigo?  Me think you idea violate the law of Taco
physic....hhihhhiiihhhii...

 

It's not the battery that generates the magnetic field.  But the
current flowing in the wire will.  There is no need for an iron
core.  THe core just concentrates the field.

However there is a slight flaw with the original idea.  The compass
will respond to the field, but won't measure the field strength.
To do that, the deflection caused by the field would need to act
against some other force, like a spring. Or depending on how strong
a field is set up, the earth's magnetic field.  It would require some
carefull callibration though.

Intresting idea.  Someone want to experiment and report back??