I purchased odyssey pc2250 batteries (6 of them). Along with that I installed 2 Victron Centaur 100 amp chargers along side my Victron
inverter which is a 70 amp charger as well. I also purchased 6 solar panels. The whole experience was an education and in some respects my discussing it here may be of some value to others and feedback of value to me so here goes ........
Sounds like a lot of charging capacity I know but I had read the Nigel Calder stuff and I was hoping to reduce my charging time. Background......... I have a 50 ft. cat. I seem to need about 250 amp hrs per day to keep up. My starting position with this boat was a Victron
inverter/charger with around 70 amps of charging capacity. My 6 lead acid batteries (100 a.h. each) were only 3 years old but the previous owner had not taken good care of them or something because they didn't seem to hold a lot of charge and it took forever to get them up to 80% charge (mayby 6-8 hrs) even to restore only a discharge of 250 a.h. to 80% charge.
My boat had a 7500 watt gen set and pityful o.e.m. chargers on the motors (only one was hooked up to the battery bank). I went to the Miami boat show this winter where I happened upon 2 highly respected people in this field (I can't mention their names) but many here would know of one of them as a prominent marine systems book author. The other guy is involved in the work being done to develop electric boat technology (he formerly was involved with the GM electric car project). Another guy was with Victron Energy (owners son and engineer). I decided at the show to purchase the Odyssey batteries and the Victron chargers.
More background my boat is French built with 240 volt 50 hz. The 240 volt is not like here. It is a 3 wire system. 240 on
line 1, Neutral on the other and ground on the 3rd. This is not compatible with North American power so I knew at the time of purchase that I had a job in front of me to make the boat suitable to plug in here. The stock boat had a Victron
inverter/charger.
I purchased the Odyssey batteries and Victron chargers from Wards Marine in Ft. Lauderdale. Frankly I don't recall what I paid for the batteries but they were less per a.h. than the Optimas when you consider that they are 120 a.h. and the Optimas are way less. As discussed somewhere else on this forum Odyssey AGM's are somewhat stupid proof but most battery types are not so forgiving.
I also purchased 6 large solar panels that should have given me 3.5 amps per hr each (I seem to get 100 a.h. out of them most sunny days). Also another sidebar note is that the Optima AGM batteries can be shipped anywhere by regular carrier because they don't leak acid if they are broken. I learned at this show that very few solar panels are warrantied if failure is due to salt water ingress into the panel. Most solar guys bragged that their panels were warrantied for 10 years but when you asked to see the warranty they either couldn't produce a hard copy or the copy that they did present said things like 'for domestic use only' , 'not warrantied against salt water ingress' and stuff like that.
After a lot of consultation I discovered that the Victron Centaur 100 amp charger will take whatever voltage and phase that you send into it and put out the 12 volts that I need to charge my batteries. First problem of not being able to plug my 240 volt 50 hz boat in to N.A. power was partially solved. Plug in shore power to charge batteries and simply run my boat off of the existing
inverter. I say partially solved because my a.c. units cannot be powered this way but they are dual voltage / dual hz systems so they can be plugged into shore on a different
line.
There was a huge benefit to this as the charger also acts as an isolation transformer supposedly (if I did the hook up right) performing the same job as an isolation transformer commonly used to block galvanic corrosion while at shore power if it is bad that way
Anyway I said earlier that I had read the Nigel Calder article in Boat Builder magazine which stated that the Odyssey battery could take a big amp charge and be fully charged in 30 min. Well I now had 270 amps of charging capacity that I installed, my chargers were set on AGM battery type, I had 720 amp hr. of battery capacity and as I said I had 270 amps of charging capacity.
I let my batteries run down to 50% and then I turned on the charger. My charge meter said I was putting in 250 amps for about 5 min. Then it slid back to around 150 - 180 amps for a short while and slowly over well past an hr. slid back to around 70 amps. Please don't criticize my math here but I still had around 100 amp hrs to go on the batteries and I was not putting in nearly what I expected. None the less the improvement has been so much over what I was used to that I remain impressed.
I hope that the reason I am not able to charge fast and with full power delivered will be easy to uncover. Perhaps I should up the charge voltage above the AGM setting on the charger to the higher setting (seems to me I am at 14.35 volts and I can get 14.85 out of the chargers). I don't want to damage the batteries so I hope that I can get in touch with Nigel to find out how he did it in 30 min.
I do recall that he had several batteries on a test bench and that he had shorted them until they were completely dead and then recharged them repeatedly for several hundred times with only something like 2 of them failing during the test period. He revived them by hitting them with 16 or 16.5 volts of charge for 1 hr. and they continued thru the rest of the test.
This is considerably a higher voltage than Odyssey specifies as MAXIMUM charge voltage without causing boiling and loss of the electrolyte and effectively not only killing the warranty but the battery also.
I am now studying whether to put some wind power on board to bridge my daily gap so I use my generator less often to recharge batteries. I live aboard my boat so I need to make water every 4 to 6 days which takes a couple of hrs anyway so charging with the diesel gen set is not out of question during the water making cycle.
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