I've had my wind mill going for around a month. It's a 6 ft diameter, 3 phase type built from Ed's windstuffnow kit. It puts out good current at the batteries. Today it's breezy, around 12mph winds and its putting out around 9 amps to the batteries. I have 4 US-1800 201 amp batteries, wired with 2 batteries in series, and the other 2 in series then both groups in parallel. I bought them brand new from a battery shop. I have an overcharge protector from mikeswindmillshop. That has been hooked up the entire time. The problem is that the batteries don't seem like they last the long on a full charge. I usually don't have much running from the batteries, just a switch, 2 little routers and the cable modem. The inverter shuts off if the battery voltage goes below 11.5 volts. The overcharge protector dumps to a 12v headlight if the voltage goes over 13volts. Until recently, that overcharge protector has never came on. The battery voltage never made it over 12.86 volts. I singled out each battery and read the voltage. One was 6.1 where all the rest were 6.26 so I figured that battery might be bad. I took it and it's partner out of the circuit and then just used the other 2 in series for my 12 volt system. The next day was windy and the over charge protector started being used, the headlight would fast off and on, never really staying on for more than a second or so each time. I though I was in good shape, maybe just 1 bad battery. I let the 2 batterys run my few devices and they only ran for a couple of hours and then the inverter shut off. Today I bought 2 different type of hydrometers, one from walmart and the other from an autopart store. With the batteries reading 6.2 volts each, the hydrometers say all the batteries are bad, no charge.....
I took the hydrometer to my car battery cells and they read great.
Did I somehow manage to kill these batteries? When my genny is running in a strong wind, with no load on it from the batteries, I measured up to 40volts afetr being rectified...is that bad?
Sorry for a long winded posting, I just wanted to include as much info as possible. 270.00 for batteries that are 1 month old that are possible bad....just depressing.. |
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