In all my years, I've never, ever, seen a single charger that attempts to break these down into smaller chunks.
Well, then I would say you've probably never seen a marine 12/24/36 volt battery charger:
No, and I don't much care to. The closest sea is 350km away. And I wasn't talking about 12/24/36V chargers, OR marine chargers.
The telco industry is probably the most wasteful industry there is and they are no model to go by for battery power systems.
Thats an emotive, argumentative and just plain wrong statement.
They don't run batteries anywhere near as long as off-grid home power systems are going to want to run them.
Not because they don't *WANT* to. They replace cells because they are *REQUIRED* to. Unlike your home, where you can sit and use your laptop until its battery is flat, and eat by a candle-light, telcos have legislative requirements in terms of uptime and system availability. Unlike your battery bank at home, if it goes flat, people don't *DIE*. Telco-land is different. People can and DO *DIE* if their batteries fail.
pointing out problems I've seen with the higher voltage system.
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For the last three days we've been having power brownouts in our house because the turbine hits 120-130 amps and sometimes over 140
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During the spikes, due to bank balance issues at at high power flow rates, the inverter goes over-voltage
So you have 12KW of turbine... and what size battery? Sounds to me like you're blaming "bank balance issues" for "inadequate system" design.
This has been going on steady here for three days. I never had any of these problems on 12 volt and I handled one hell of a lot more amps on my 12 volt system than I got coming in on 24.
You seem to be misunderstanding "watts" and "amps".
You will argue I'm wrong, but I rather suspect that what was happening is that when you had 12V, the cable resistance to your turbine had a MUCH higher effect than you counted on. When the amps went up high, the voltage drop across your cables went up *EXPONENTIALLY*. That is, your spikes were being "softened out" by losing more in your cabling. I suspect *THAT* is the *REAL* reason you are now having problems that you didn't have before.
I don't have 12KW of turbines. But I do know when I run my genset (on those days where I get no wind and little usable sun), I can poke those sorts of power into my batteries and they don't move much further than about 56V at 70A (so thats roughly equivalent to 140A in your 24V system).
My voltage operating range on 12 volt was only 12.0 nominal to 15.0 peak - 3 volt range. With that damned series connection in there it's 24.0 nominal to 30.0 peak. And when the turbine hits high amps the system voltage climb is twice as fast on the 24 volt system, compounded by the series connection.
So tell me how 12-15V range on 12V is ANY DIFFERENT to 24-30V in a 24V system? I'd argue that your 12-15V is actually WORSE than my 48V system that only goes up to 56.4V during heavy charging (equivalent to 14.1V). After a 25% discharge my volts have dropped to 47.8V (equiv to 11.95V per 12V chunk).
I'm only a n00b in this game, having lived totally off-grid only since the end of 2004. In that time however, I've had zero downtime as a result of the battery over or under voltage issues you cite. Also, with the arrangement of system components I have, I've been able to completely remove and replace my battery bank *SAFELY* without losing power to the house.
Its as has been said time and again - it depends on what you want to do, how you want to do it, how much you're prepared to spend on it and what your expectations are, as to what's the "best" choice of system voltage. For my money, it was 48V. For my *CUSTOMERS* money, where I am being asked to work on *THEIR* expensive equipment, MSW was never going to happen.
Just because *I* went that way doesn't make it "the right way" for anyone else (even you!). However as has been said before, just because something works *for you* doesn't mean it's automatically the right choice for anyone/everyone else.
Your "mate" before was "advising" to not spend money on a proper inverter, that msw (marketing lie for "barely better than squarewave") was quite good enough, and spend the extra cash on batteries. A very ill-advised suggestion in my view - without knowing exactly what the requirements were.