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[GallenH]

I'm still struggling with my house battery: 105AH LifeLine purchased about 7 years ago. Has been living in AZ environment. I can't seem to get the battery up to what my Victron reports as 100% charge. That inability exists whether I'm driving or if I'm charging via converter at home. My latest readings are shown below.

VictronRead.png

On the left is the reading immediately after disconnecting home electrical from RV. On the right is the reading after letting the RV sit for 3 hours off of home electric. I know it's not the best evaluation but the volt readings correspond to what LifeLine indicates should be somewhere between 60-70% SOC.

Any ideas/observations most welcome
Glenn

[booster]

Originally Posted by GallenH

I'm still struggling with my house battery: 105AH LifeLine purchased about 7 years ago. Has been living in AZ environment. I can't seem to get the battery up to what my Victron reports as 100% charge. That inability exists whether I'm driving or if I'm charging via converter at home. My latest readings are shown below.

Attachment 14870

On the left is the reading immediately after disconnecting home electrical from RV. On the right is the reading after letting the RV sit for 3 hours off of home electric. I know it's not the best evaluation but the volt readings correspond to what LifeLine indicates should be somewhere between 60-70% SOC.

Any ideas/observations most welcome
Glenn

Are your pix swapped? How do you have more SOC after sitting than fresh off charge?


What it looks like off charge is not what you want to look at.


What you need to see is what is happening at the very end of your charge cycle to see if the battery is really full and if the charger is doing a good job of charging.


Lifeline defines a full battery on charge, as being at 14.1-14.4 volts and at .5%C amps so you would want .5 amps charging at that point. If the voltage is lower or the amps are higher, the battery is not full to Victron spec.


You monitor probably has history in it so you may be able to see that information in that history. Without knowing that there is no way to tell what is going on accurately.

[Uncle_Rico]

I recall your Victron monitor was misbehaving last year as well. On Victron monitors a positive current means current is flowing into your battery. Is there any charging source connected when these pics were taken? do you have solar? If not I still suspect you have an installation problem like the shunt is in backwards or maybe you're not capturing all of the return current to the battery bank.

[GallenH]

Right now RV is in shop having some chassis work done. When it gets back I'll run another series of tests. The ones posted are "immediately off charger" and "3 hours off charger." I did not run one while on the charger. Will this next time. But to answer your other questions, no solar connected. No charging source at all with the previous readings. And I've had this Victron monitor for several years. I think the most depletion it ever showed was down to 78% and, in the past, it aways got back up to 100% after charging on converter or driving or on solar. So I'm pretty sure that the shunt is correctly installed. Keep an eye on this thread. I'll update with new readings sometime this weekend. Thanks.

[booster]

Originally Posted by GallenH

Right now RV is in shop having some chassis work done. When it gets back I'll run another series of tests. The ones posted are "immediately off charger" and "3 hours off charger." I did not run one while on the charger. Will this next time. But to answer your other questions, no solar connected. No charging source at all with the previous readings. And I've had this Victron monitor for several years. I think the most depletion it ever showed was down to 78% and, in the past, it aways got back up to 100% after charging on converter or driving or on solar. So I'm pretty sure that the shunt is correctly installed. Keep an eye on this thread. I'll update with new readings sometime this weekend. Thanks.

I have said many, many times on this forum that with AGM batteries in particular, and with any shunt based monitor, you shouldn't believe the SOC % on the monitor until it is full calibrated by resetting based on volts and amps. That is where you always have to start in troubleshooting these systems because if you reference is point, everything you do after that is going to be wrong. 12.4v off charge and showing 100% SOC is not possible if the battery and charging are both good.

[Uncle_Rico]

Originally Posted by GallenH

Right now RV is in shop having some chassis work done. When it gets back I'll run another series of tests. The ones posted are "immediately off charger" and "3 hours off charger." I did not run one while on the charger. Will this next time. But to answer your other questions, no solar connected. No charging source at all with the previous readings. And I've had this Victron monitor for several years. I think the most depletion it ever showed was down to 78% and, in the past, it aways got back up to 100% after charging on converter or driving or on solar. So I'm pretty sure that the shunt is correctly installed. Keep an eye on this thread. I'll update with new readings sometime this weekend. Thanks.

Something is definitely wonky because with no charging sources present the monitor is showing about 0.9amps of charge current, the state of charge estimate is increasing accordingly (0.9 x 4hrs = 3.6Ah or about 3%), and the time remaining is showing "--" (i.e infinite) which means the monitor thinks the battery is accepting charge.

[GallenH]

Somewhat bizarre but I'm sure explainable. Got RV back from car shop yesterday and parked in dw without plugging in. Here's my morning reading.IMG_4009.jpg

We now have 100%..........however........the volt reading is 10.45. That's close to my old vo meter (10.51). That appears to be below Lifeline's spec for 0% SOC. (2nd) however: That reading is with the battery disconnect in "off" position. I'm thinking that I have to take everything off the battery posts and do a volt test with my meter to see what the reading is with absolutely nothing attached.

Make sense?

I'll also, after that, put my car battery tender on the naked battery for a day and see what I get on the meter then.

Any other suggestions?

[booster]

Your battery tender may or may not charge with it low already, and if it does it still will be painfully slow and probably never get to full.


Your system seems to be quite messed up for whatever reason, and you really need to get back to basics and start at the beginning of a methodical problem solving procedure.


The first step, IMO, should be to make sure the battery is in decent shape and is charged to full while it is not connected to the system or the monitor. This is because I think there is a good chance the monitor is also not working properly.


I would suggest you get one of these to charge the battery because it will charge a battery with low, or even no, voltage because it is a power supply design.


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...e?ie=UTF8&th=1


Get some cheap jumper cables and cut off the clips on one end and put them on the above charger.



Disconnect or remove the battery from the entire system so absolutely nothing is connected to it but the charger. The charger needs to be the only thing connected to the battery, and that includes the ground side.



Set the voltage on the charger above with it plugged in and in power supply mode with no battery attached. Use a voltmeter and turn the adjusting screw to get 14.4v.


Attach it to the battery, plug it in, and charge the battery for at least 5 hours, but keep watching it and do it outside in case it is internally shorted and overheats.


Disconnect it after charging, check and log the voltage, and then let it sit. Check the voltage every hour for a few hours and log the voltages.


You will now have a good idea of if your battery is good or not, although you haven't done a discharge test yet, but first you need to get a good charge. It is obvious from the history of this issue that your system doesn't seem to be able to charge a battery properly and your monitor also is not able to know if the battery is full or not.


Once the battery is proven good or replaced we can move on to making sure the monitor is wired and setup properly so that the system itself can be evaluated.

[GallenH]

Originally Posted by booster

Your battery tender may or may not charge with it low already, and if it does it still will be painfully slow and probably never get to full.

Right, I believe I read that somewhere and forgot.

Your system seems to be quite messed up for whatever reason, and you really need to get back to basics and start at the beginning of a methodical problem solving procedure.

But if it's that the battery is shot wouldn't that be less the system and just that the battery is gone?

Disconnect or remove the battery from the entire system so absolutely nothing is connected to it but the charger. The charger needs to be the only thing connected to the battery, and that includes the ground side.

Attach it to the battery, plug it in, and charge the battery for at least 5 hours, but keep watching it and do it outside in case it is internally shorted and overheats.


Disconnect it after charging, check and log the voltage, and then let it sit. Check the voltage every hour for a few hours and log the voltages.


You will now have a good idea of if your battery is good or not, although you haven't done a discharge test yet, but first you need to get a good charge. It is obvious from the history of this issue that your system doesn't seem to be able to charge a battery properly and your monitor also is not able to know if the battery is full or not.


Once the battery is proven good or replaced we can move on to making sure the monitor is wired and setup properly so that the system itself can be evaluated.

Sounds like a plan!

thx.glenn

[booster]

Originally Posted by GallenH

But if it's that the battery is shot wouldn't that be less the system and just that the battery is gone?

thx.glenn

Absolutely, but to this point you don't know if the battery is good or not, so you need to test that without the system connected. All we know is that either the battery and system are bad, but it could also be both. Problem solving starts with isolating the problem, and it is the easiest to check the battery by itself than to try to test the system with a maybe good/maybe bad battery. I will point out, in regards to the system, that you have monitor that is saying your battery is full at 10.5v, so there definitely is something wrong in at least the monitor part of the system as that is impossible to have.


You have been chasing this for a long time, I think, and are still where you were when you started, so a change in how it is analyzed certainly seems to be needed.

[otr]

Booster,
Thanks for all of you great insights!

[GallenH]

Ok. Here's the latest. I pulled the battery out of the RV and charged it bare, without any loads. I've got an older charger and when it got in the range of c.12.6v I put it on a battery tender. Solid red light but eventually became flashing green and by morning solid green.

Immediately after taking it off the tender the battery voltage was 13.16v. After letting it rest for 4hrs it reads 12.77-78 (meter fluctuates between). I've been checking it every hour for the past 3 hours and that's where it has remained.

LifeLine spec sheets says it should be >12.78. So I'm around that spec. Not sure about the accuracy of my meter. But that's where I'm at.

So what's next? The place that sold me the LifeLine is OutOB. Not sure what kind of testing they would do anyways.

[booster]

Now that you have full battery to start with, you can put it into the system to see what happens. The first thing you should do is reset the battery monitor to 100% as you are sure you have a full battery. The Victron instructions should say how to do that. One a standalone monitor I think is push + and - minus at the same time IIRC.



Then watch what goes on. What does the amp reading say with no loads on it that you know off? What if you turn on a light?



Try to get the amps to about 3-4 amps and let it run for 24 hour and see what the battery % and voltage are (loads off again, battery disconnected and rested an hour). Check the disconnected battery voltage and compared it to the Lifeline predicted voltage at that SOC from the Technical Manual.


This will give an idea of how good the battery capacity is and if the monitor is counting correctly. If all looks good then we can move to seeing if the charger is doing anything or not.

[GallenH]

I think it might be worth mentioning that I cleaned the battery case and noticed that there is a slight waviness on the case sides (both long sides, not the widths.
batterycase.jpg
Probably hard to see but deflections/bulges are c.1/8+"

Significant in any way? Don't recall them being there when I bought battery.

[GallenH]

Thanks booster. Before I drop it in I'm going to double-check the breakers quickly for continuity. Also do some labeling of wires. Should be easy enough as you can see from the (bare bones) wiring diagram from the manual.

PW1.jpg

[GallenH]

Yeah, well it's over a 100º in Phoenix right now and hotter in the RV. Hard to see the VO meter when your dripping into your eyes. Tomorrow morning will be better..............drops WAY down to 88-90º at night. Also will see if the resting voltage changes at all.

[Bud]

Originally Posted by GallenH

Yeah, well it's over a 100º in Phoenix right now and hotter in the RV. Hard to see the VO meter when your dripping into your eyes. Tomorrow morning will be better..............drops WAY down to 88-90º at night. Also will see if the resting voltage changes at all.

I suppose a functioning B could be life saving! Get your B working well and the A/C. If the grid were lost where you live, it could result in a Katrina. I live in the metro New Orleans area. Take care in that heat.

[GallenH]

This morning I tested all of the circuit breakers including the ones that come from the alternator and the convertor/charger. They're ok. I reconnected the LifeLine and synced the Victron (you're right, booster: +/- for 3sec.). So here's the first reading:
IMG_4031.jpg
Note voltage has dropped to 12.51v. I'm assuming that the 0.23 draw is from my CO and LP alarms which are hard wired.

Then I turned on various 12v items until I got a load somewhere between 3 and 4 amps. Here's a look at that:
IMG_4032.jpg
Voltage dropped again with the loads to 12.21v.

LifeLine says that 12.5v = c.75% and 12.2 = c.52% but those specs are open circuit voltages and I'm no longer OCV with the loads applied. Consequently I don't know exactly how to interpret what I'm reading.

BTW: I don't have the engine running, convertor/charger not connected to 120v and no solar running into the system.

I've got a timer set for 1 hour increments. Will update.

MANY thanks!
glenn

[booster]

Originally Posted by GallenH

This morning I tested all of the circuit breakers including the ones that come from the alternator and the convertor/charger. They're ok. I reconnected the LifeLine and synced the Victron (you're right, booster: +/- for 3sec.). So here's the first reading:
Attachment 14884
Note voltage has dropped to 12.51v. I'm assuming that the 0.23 draw is from my CO and LP alarms which are hard wired.

Then I turned on various 12v items until I got a load somewhere between 3 and 4 amps. Here's a look at that:
Attachment 14885
Voltage dropped again with the loads to 12.21v.

LifeLine says that 12.5v = c.75% and 12.2 = c.52% but those specs are open circuit voltages and I'm no longer OCV with the loads applied. Consequently I don't know exactly how to interpret what I'm reading.

BTW: I don't have the engine running, convertor/charger not connected to 120v and no solar running into the system.

I've got a timer set for 1 hour increments. Will update.

MANY thanks!
glenn

Unless you have solar or another charge source on it, it appears the shunt is wired backwards. The positive amps say that. Discharging should be negative, charging positive.



The monitor may have a setting in it to be able to reverse the reading there.


If not, you need to turn the shunt around so the connections to it are swapped.

[GallenH]

Yes. Don't know how I managed to do that but I had to flip the shunt as my cables were carefully selected to avoid excess. But that worked fine. You know I always wondered why my amp consumption would read 2amps and not -2amps. Unfortunately had to resync the Victron since you're supposed to do that when it's been disconnected. So this reading of amps consumed and % is undoubtedly false. Looks like my battery voltage has dropped again.

IMG_4035.jpg