My sg's however are low enough at times to scare the crap out of me.
That's one reason I don't check the SG until the batteries are in float for a while. Another item is getting the hydrometer to read the same consistently. I gave up and purchased a refractometer. That helps.
I only add water when the plates are barely beginning to show. A translucent 16 ounce squeeze bottle works best for me. I only add 8 ounces at a time per cell. More than that means I should have checked it sooner. Any remainder that's needed is added the next morning during bulk just to cover the plates. A small led flashlight is helpful when checking levels. I use the light reflection. The instructions say to fill to 1/2 inch of the fill tube's bottom. If I do, it will be a mess all over the battery.
ChrisO, I hope you don't mind me quoting you, but this post you made on greenpower talk is just what I needed when I was having problems with SG's and getting the cells voltage consistent.
http://www.greenpowertalk.org/showthread.php?t=19149&page=2 It's post number #36, which is half way down the page, below the graph. I had forgotten all about it.
I used the same scheme, but different numbers. 2.5 VPC was a little high for absorb because it boiled the batteries. That's how I ended up with 2.4 VPC instead. Te set the ending amps, I watched the amps when the batteries went into absorb and watched where the amps leveled off. That became my ending amps. That has gradually changed with time from 20 amps to 10 amps. BTW, my batteries are about 4 months old now.
I have to ask, do you have enough solar or wind to charge your batteries? I have 2 of these big batteries and had to increase solar from 1 kW to 7.1 kw to be able to charge the batteries and run heavy loads like an air conditioner on the same day. Sometimes I still don't get out of bulk all day. One of my charge controllers has a shunt to measure how many amp hours I'm putting back into the batteries. I also have a Bogart TM 2025 coming just to back up the charge controller.