My batteries are charged "properly" by a combination of 310W of solar power, a 400W wind turbine and (very rarely) the engine alternator.

Regulation is by a Tristar 60 configured as a dump load regulator and dumping into a 600W 12V heating element in the hot water tank. The set point of the Tristar 60 is 14.4V, 0.2V higher than the engine alternator which is set at 14.2V since I don't particularly want the dump load regulator load up the alternator. Everything works just fine and most days I am dumping power for a couple of hours in the middle of the day. On days with lots of wind and sun, I'm even heating water with the excess energy, but the main reason my dump load is in the hot water tank is to avoid heating the boat.

I believe I do know how to charge my batteries.

What would you do different?

Apart from possibly adding a solar regulator instead of letting the dump load regulator take care of everything, I can't think of a thing to change. Adding a solar regulator would mean I loose the water heating of course.

I do not have an AC generator or access to grid power.

The TS-60 runs at 300-350Hz.  It is probably doing the same or better than a self powered desulfator.

Differences in sg would indicate the need for equalizing in this installation, I have no doubt Owen knows how to look after his system.

Battery technology has been around a long time, but despite the makers best information/intentions once they are installed, each installation has it's own characteristics which the owner needs to learn and manage.

First, high temp anything is a bad thing. No need, just causes damage.

Second, high current pulses, yes. But at 3.5MHz? Coughing violently...

I am getting excellent results with pulses in the order of 5-10C at no more than 100Hz, at about a 0.04 - 0.05% duty cycle (frequency/duty cycle depends on the phase of SOC).

Within 3 cycles, a battery is back to reasonable health, a fourth or fifth bringing them as good as they're going to get. This takes quite a while to do, depending on the depth of sulfation, sometimes weeks and even months.

"Shaking them up" as you put it will only do damage. You can't brute force sulfation out of a battery, you have to coax it out. Also, gassing is minimal if the desulfation process is being done right.

The concept behind the pulses is that the sulfate acts like the dielectric in a capacitor. It insulates against current flow, and since it is a coating all around the plates, the way to beat it is with pulses that can transcend the dielectric, until the sulfate has been turned back into active material. The pulse hits the plates, then disappears, and the charge dissipates as surface charge within the sulfate. Over and over and over again, until its contiguous material.

Doing things the way you're talking about doing them, you'd need more than a bomb shelter, you'd need the EPA to come and pick up your molten mess when you're done blowing them up.

Getting the battery to handle extremely high current pulses isn't the problem. It's designing a pulse switch that can handle the transient current flow...

Sorry if this seems sharp, but when I read things like "an arc internally will throw hot acid through the broken case", and "sloshing, bubbling, wide awake batteries", I have a tendency to worry about people's knowledge of what is really happening (or supposed to be happening)... HOT acid? An internal arc can (and has) ignited the hydrogen under the right circumstances; this can happen during "normal" use if there is a weak cell... but under no circumstances should the acid ever be HOT, and especially not during desulfating!!

I just hope I live a fair distance from anything that you're desulfating with talk like that. In a word? Scary.