Wow, thanks gents, the feedback you are giving is truly exceptional, you are helping me out immensely and wish I could express my gratitude to each one of you. THANK YOU so very much!!!!
Now, to answer all your questions.
Volvo asked "Where do you live?" I live in Northern California not far from the coast. We get tons-o-son, and my panels are on the southern slope on part of our ridge. I get sun on them for most of the day, but the late afternoon they get shaded.
Volvo, I do want to get a Trimetric, and someday I will, I just have had a tough few months financially and it will need to wait till I have a little extra one month. If I do need to replace my batteries then I will be in deeper dodo as it will most likely take me several months to save up enough for a new bank. This is part of why I am trying to determine if I need new ones or not, so I can help budget for teh next 12 months.
You wrote "There may in fact be an easy way for you to load test your batteries, I don't know." I may have found something... I was installing four new batteries at one of our local fire stations today and a neighbor came by with a load tester and we hooked it up to the two older L16s I had just pulled. (Our entire community is off grid.) The tester was designed for 12 volts but it seemed to work on the big 6ers. We knew one of the L16s was bad because it had a bad center cell, but we did not know which one. This device placed a load on the battery and then had an analog meter that showed the condition. One was GOOD, the other was REPLACE. I am wondering if this tester was the same as zeusmorg was talking about higher in this thread.
Anyway I intend to borrow it from him and see what it says about my bank. And Volvo, don't worry about sounding harsh, it did not come across that way, I appreciate all your comments, I can see your intentions are good, and your advice has already proven helpful. So thank you, again.
Jim asked: "Do you have a temperature sensor on the batteries? I saw that your temp is 54 degrees. Fahrenheit or celsius ?" Yes, there is a temp sensor on the bank, or at least I believe there is. There is a red (sensor looking) device taped to the side of one of the batteries. I think it runs to the MPPT device, but I have no way of seeing a reading of what the temperature is. When I said it was 54 degrees, I was thinking ambient air temperature, not battery temp. I do not know what the battery temperature is. The 54 was Fahrenheit by the way. 50 - 70 is our typical Northern California temperatures during Fall/ early Winter.
Gary D writes: "...you need some way to watch the amps in versus the amps out of your battery bank. You are now the "power company". Do you have a well pump that you aren't accounting for? ...It would seem that your usage is a bit higher than the previous owner."
No well pump, but we do have two pumps. One is a slow pump that pushes our water up from our spring on the northern slope. I have that on a timer and run it during peak sun hours. It's load is minor. Our other pump is our pressure pump for domestic water. Now that bugger pulls quite a draw, but is only on for 60 seconds at a time, depending on water usage.
Our usage may be more than the previous owner but I would think not as we have no TV, or devices we use during the day other than the two laptops, router and satalite modem. But who knows what the previous owners had.
Erne asks about Phantom loads: Heck yes I got em', seems like everything has PLs these days, Most items I keep on power strips and just turn them on when needed. Laptops, fax / printer, modem, router, boom box, etc.... The Fire pager just stays on 24/7 because we are always on call. Our inverter does stay on 24/7, I do not have it on search mode. When this thread is over, I would love to hear your advice on that, I do recall reading in my inverters manual that I could set the box to search OVER a certain draw, but I have not looked in to that. I am sure there are folks whom are very familiar with the older trace 4024s out there. I do also try and keep the panels clean from crud, but that seems like a never ending battle. My rack adjusts slightly to match the suns angle, but honestly, I only adjust it about every three months.
Shay asked about "pulse charging? Desulfation?"
I know I am supposed to equalize the batteries once a month with the generator, but it seems my generator only gets my batteries as full as a good sunny day. On a sunny day the panels will charge the batteries up to 28.9 to 29V and that is all I can get from my generator as well (according to the voltage on my MPPT unit.
What is Pulse Charging? Is that just short charging times? If so we don't have that. Desulfation happens when you equalize correct? I am presuming that is also happening when O get the batteries above say 28.7. Your thoughts?
Thanks again to everyone, I really appreciate your time and your help on this. Let me know what you think about trying out the load tester. I can give it a try this weekend.