[Elecraft] Fwd: Bioenno's July Promotion

[Richard Fjeld]

Hi Guy,

(Interesting, and nice writing, BTW)
I share your experience with batteries, only from the Bell side of 
things.  We ran the major switching centers you described.
We had individual cells that held 50 gallons of acid in each cell. A 
graph was kept for each cell.  They lasted many years.

My reply is addressing your comments *_only_* about 'floating' lead acid 
batteries on the 12 volt line.

Yes, you are correct with your statements about using a three step 
charging process for best charge.  I have been using a
lead acid boat battery floating across my 12V DC line to allow me to 
quickly end a qso, and properly shut down my K3
during a power outage. Most of the time the outage is short and I can 
resume my qso as if nothing happened.
I do not otherwise discharge/recharge it.  (My concern is hydrogen gas). 
Yes, a UPS can work.  I trust this arrangement more.

A deep cycle boat battery is intended for charge/dis-charge cycles 
repeatedly. It sometimes stays in a discharged state for hours or days
in high heat or cold before getting recharged again at a single step 
rate.  Despite these conditions, they last pretty well but decline 
gradually.
A deep cycle boat battery may be overkill for me if I don't intend to 
operate with it, but who knows what could happen?

Once again about lead acid batteries, if optimum is the goal, then I 
think the biggest thing we lack in our consumer
batteries today is not being able to monitor or charge individual cells. 
I prefer cells with removable caps for maintenance also.
How else can one tell what the specific gravity is, or the electrolyte 
level?   I can remember when car batteries
had the bus exposed so we could read the individual cell voltages. It 
was common practice to apply a  'boost-charge'
to a weak cell to bring the voltage up. I hate to see all the batteries 
becoming 'maintenance free'.   But DSFDF.

Dick, n0ce


On 7/15/2016 5:38 AM, Guy Olinger K2AV wrote:
> My first encounter with the rather complex issues of battery floating and
> discharge were with AT&T Long Lines in the 60's, where we had such things
> as 10,000 ampere 12 VDC supplies for many thousands of tube filaments, with
> delta 440 AC driving huge motor generators in parallel, and strings of low
> gravity 2' x 2' x 5' single cell batteries floating across the discharge
> bus, and end cells to switch into the string to maintain 12 volts as the
> batteries went into their normal discharge curves.
>
> Carelessness in the battery room could get you burned, blinded, possibly
> killed. Also having a major switching center go down because of batteries
> in Washington, DC, could get one in a lot of trouble with various branches
> of government. We had Bell Laboratories, Bell System Practices, and lots of
> management in our ear all the time about how to do the batteries. Zero
> tolerance for battery screw-ups, for any reason.
>
>