Generally you want the voltage of the array to be whatever is typically drawing the most wattage. Anymore it's 48VDC since all the high power stuff is 48VDC. That way you avoid converting to that voltage.
You need enough charger to run your stuff, plus enough to charge the batteries in however long you want to recover. So if you've got a 48V 10A charger and are drawing 9A with your radios, and a 100AH array (4 100AH batteries in series), you'd find that it would take 100 hours to recover. This is probably too long, plus there's some self-discharge to worry about. Note that the manufacturer's recommended charge rate is typically at most 0.3C, meaning that for a 100AH array, you want at most 30A of charge. You can get away with more, but I wouldn't push it if you want long life out of your batteries. This would charge most of the way in 3-4 hours. If you went down to 0.1C you'd probably still be ok, since that is 10 hours, but a rule of thumb is you really shouldn't go below 0.1C. Note that if those 4 batteries are in a 24VDC array, it's a 200AH array, and all of the currents double... since now you've got 2 batteries in series @24V, which is 100AH@24V, and another which is 100AH@24V. On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 9:27 PM Steve Jones <thatoneguyst...@gmail.com> wrote: > First question, if i have say 4 12v batteries and want to double runtime > by adding 4 more, will that require a bigger charger? Or can i just keep > adding batteries and it just takes longer to reach a full charge? > > If for whatever reason, one of the batteries has less of a charge, once > the rest reach full charge will it continue until its at the same level of > charge? > > I seem to recall that i keep getting told 24 vold battery arrays are more > efficient than 48v. If thats the case, do i just put a 24v to 48v power > supply on it to run all my gear? > > > > > -- > AF mailing list > AF@af.afmug.com > http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com > -- - Forrest
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