battery bank inverters lxi

[K Sarich]

Greg, sorry if we've hijacked your thread.
Please do give us an update when you get your Inverters back.

David,
I bought a the assembled package from Balqon.com. Not sure of the definition of passive balancing as I am just repeating what I read. After 8 months the cells are in balance, so whatever it is it is working fine.

As for longevity: Yes, I believe we will benefit from not taking the battery to either end, in fact for storage they suggest storing at middle charge. That, to me is one of the ultimate beauties of these things. You do not need to charge to the top. This translates in the real world to - seeing your battery needs a charge, realizing your heading to dinner in an hour, so you crank up the generator, pump in a hundred amps or whatever, turn the generator off and head to dinner. The next day or the next month you can put some more juice in and you have done no harm to the battery.

It takes a bit of adjusting the brain to realize many of the lead acid conventions no longer apply. A typical pre-solar install day for us at Q would be to go to sleep with the battery at 13.2v or 13.3v and wake up at 13.0v or 13.1v then sometime during the day charge for a couple of hours. On occasion we would charge to the top( 13.38v) or so and occasionally if we didn't want to run the generator I'd let them drop to 12.8v. Prior to the Lithiums we were charging a couple of hours TWICE a day.

I spent a lot of time trying to get the charging voltages just right, it turned out in hindsight that I was both mis-understanding and receiving conflicting info from Balqon and Magnum. In the end the best advice I received was from Samra at Balqon who said, "Just go play with the battery, if the charge voltage becomes too high the battery will shut down". I did, it did. I then realized we should stop babying these things and just enjoy using them.