Chassis Battery Charging

[travelite]

Al, I personally think the failures are due to heat. I'm not sure about the XL but in the H3 the charger along with the Vanner equalizers are placed in the sealed basement bay aft of the curb-side tag axle wheel. On my H3, that compartment has no ventilation and in the summertime after a day of driving the temperatures there soar. It desperately needs a vent and a fan. Until I install ventilation I typically open that compartment upon reaching our destination to let things cool off.

The battery temperature sensors are controversial. Here again we're trying to get two inverters to behave like one w/o the SWI cable. It's true that the sensors themselves are not electrically identical. Then there's the analog to digital circuitry on the Trace inverters adding their own variance. The circuitry going into the ADC (analog to digital converter) is all analog with passive components that have their own tolerances. There's no way two independent inverters with two separate BTS (battery temperature sensors) are going to sense the same temperature readings. This exasperates the issue of one inverter going into Absorption and starting it's Absorption countdown timer sooner than the other, and I'm not so sure the difference in timer expirations is negligible. With modified battery voltages corrected by BTS readings there can be hours differences in Absorption timer expirations which can truly have an effect on bringing a battery bank to 110% during absorption. So this is an area where folks disagree and where we might be better off disconnecting the BTS's. At least if they're disconnected we can manage the Bulk/Float time differential between two independent inverters. With the BTS's in place I'm not so sure. This needs further investigation.