Trojan Batteries?

[Plevier]

This link is exactly what Richard10002 was asking in his post:

3) They do say that much information in bars, yacht clubs and on Internet forums may be mythical


Mt Sterling is a law unto himself - charging a 100Ah battery at 160 amps to claim a 457% improvement with his system is just nonsense. You have to draw your own conclusions from everything he publishes. He says AGMs, or any sealed battery, shouldn't be on boats - Nigel Calder says exactly the opposite, although he is now trying the Odyssey TPPLs, and having some problems.

Yes Sterling has some very funny ideas - largely just out of date I think - especially about AGM.
Calder would do better with Lifelines for the hybrid system but they would be much bigger, heavier and dearer than the Odysseys.
I was involved in the Odyssey's forerunner and would never have proposed it for that application. It was designed for 30 second duties starting gas turbine engines (but did turn out to be very good for lots of other things too).

 

[ianj99]

This link is exactly what Richard10002 was asking in his post:

3) They do say that much information in bars, yacht clubs and on Internet forums may be mythical


Mt Sterling is a law unto himself - charging a 100Ah battery at 160 amps to claim a 457% improvement with his system is just nonsense. You have to draw your own conclusions from everything he publishes. He says AGMs, or any sealed battery, shouldn't be on boats - Nigel Calder says exactly the opposite, although he is now trying the Odyssey TPPLs, and having some problems.

The reason Sterling says AGMs and SLAs shouldn't be on boats, is based on using his charging regimes. Very high current & 100% charging regimes are only safe on non sealed batteries as there will be considerable gassing. You also have to check the electrolyte levels regularly.

 

[Plevier]

The reason Sterling says AGMs and SLAs shouldn't be on boats, is based on using his charging regimes. Very high current & 100% charging regimes are only safe on non sealed batteries as there will be considerable gassing. You also have to check the electrolyte levels regularly.

You can safely charge (many) AGM SLAs - not gels - at rates as high as or higher than than wets because they accept the current at much lower voltage. He won't believe that. I don't think he accepts that gel and AGM are very different.
I'm not sure what you mean by "100% charging regimes". Are you talking state of charge or %age current?

 

[Mistroma]

I realise that posts have been quite long but it is difficult to come to reasonable conclusions without an awful lot of information. Even with this information, a lot depends on the individual (local battery costs, lifestyle, installation). The posts haven't pulled up anything I didn't know in principle, but have provided clarification and changed my priorities slightly.

I was a little worried by Troubador's initial comment about shortening lifespan by not returning to 100% on every cycle. I thought that I'd miscalculated when making my choice. However, it soon became clear that he was actually drawing attention to well known facts and I was putting the wrong emphasis on what he was saying. I believe that I have factored in this information already when making comparisons and eventually choosing T-105s.

e.g.
Trojan quote around 1200 cycles at 50% discharge but they don't quote their testing methodology. I was always dubious about using their figures as I assumed they were optimised in some manner. I now think that they probably do it by discharging to 50% at somewhere around C/20 rate and then charging as perfectly as they can until back at 100% before repeating. Really obvious I suppose but I had not put it into words when looking at the graphs. I did ask myself "how much will my sub-optimal charging affect lifespan?). Difficult to answer and best I could do was to knock off about 33%. I concluded that 5-6 years was reasonable given my lifestyle & 6-7 months on board each year.

I understand why Troubador often said "not enough information" or not "black and white" as there isn't a one size fits all answer. Almost everything you change in a boat's electrical system has a knock on effect on several other things. You also have to allow for personal preferences. e.g. I'm perfectly happy to monitor and maintain batteries so that cancels out any "no maintenance" with AGM.

Lifeline AGM were 3 x cost wrt T105s (£/Ah). Of course I could get away with lower capacity but price still appeared to be 2 x cost of T105s. Lifeline & Trojan both quoted 1000 cycles at 50% DOD. But there were many other factors to be considered.

High initial capital cost
Increased risk of losing money (failure on expensive product can be costlier than failure on cheaper one)
Cruising plans (away from UK for 3-4 years, so warranty becomes less useful)
Past experience with flooded batteries (I averaged 7-8 years, 11 years once so do tend to look after batteries)

A bit longwinded but I think battery threads often suffer from lack of information and entrenched views.

I guess I'm saying that you won't find a magic answer. You need to collect a lot of information, model likely usage vs. charging and even then it's still a bit of a guess (just more educated).

 

[Plevier]

I realise that posts have been quite long but it is difficult to come to reasonable conclusions without an awful lot of information. Even with this information, a lot depends on the individual (local battery costs, lifestyle, installation). The posts haven't pulled up anything I didn't know in principle, but have provided clarification and changed my priorities slightly.

I was a little worried by Troubador's initial comment about shortening lifespan by not returning to 100% on every cycle. I thought that I'd miscalculated when making my choice. However, it soon became clear that he was actually drawing attention to well known facts and I was putting the wrong emphasis on what he was saying. I believe that I have factored in this information already when making comparisons and eventually choosing T-105s.

e.g.
Trojan quote around 1200 cycles at 50% discharge but they don't quote their testing methodology. I was always dubious about using their figures as I assumed they were optimised in some manner. I now think that they probably do it by discharging to 50% at somewhere around C/20 rate and then charging as perfectly as they can until back at 100% before repeating. Really obvious I suppose but I had not put it into words when looking at the graphs. I did ask myself "how much will my sub-optimal charging affect lifespan?). Difficult to answer and best I could do was to knock off about 33%. I concluded that 5-6 years was reasonable given my lifestyle & 6-7 months on board each year.

I understand why Troubador often said "not enough information" or not "black and white" as there isn't a one size fits all answer. Almost everything you change in a boat's electrical system has a knock on effect on several other things. You also have to allow for personal preferences. e.g. I'm perfectly happy to monitor and maintain batteries so that cancels out any "no maintenance" with AGM.

Lifeline AGM were 3 x cost wrt T105s (£/Ah). Of course I could get away with lower capacity but price still appeared to be 2 x cost of T105s. Lifeline & Trojan both quoted 1000 cycles at 50% DOD. But there were many other factors to be considered.

High initial capital cost
Increased risk of losing money (failure on expensive product can be costlier than failure on cheaper one)
Cruising plans (away from UK for 3-4 years)
Past experience with flooded batteries (I averaged 7-8 years, 11 years once so do tend to look after batteries)

A bit longwinded but I think battery threads often suffer from lack of information and entrenched views.

I guess I'm saying that you won't find a magic answer. You need to collect a lot of information, model likely usage vs. charging and even then it's still a bit of a guess (just more educated).

A very fair post.
My comments are always made as a former battery industry technical person and aim at the ideal. You may get away with less than the ideal without the skies falling in. Lots of people are blissfully unaware of what degraded performance they are living with.
There is indeed a question over Trojan's cycle life figures. What capacity are they using? What do they mean by depth of cycle? The normal definition of failure is when capacity is down to 80%, and you oversize the battery when specifying to allow for it, so most likely their 100% cycle is actually 80Ah out of 100Ah. Makes a big difference!
What it does not mean is you can get 100Ah cycles out of a 100Ah battery and on the (n+1) cycle it will either self destruct or fall short for the first time.
Yes certainly they will recharge very thoroughly between every cycle. What else could they do?
Trying to match manufacturers performance figures islike trying to match the official fuel consumption for your car.

 

[Mistroma]

A very fair post.
Yes certainly they will recharge very thoroughly between every cycle. What else could they do?
Trying to match manufacturers performance figures islike trying to match the official fuel consumption for your car.

Yes, it is obvious when stated. I was saying that most people (me included) tend to fill in their own information. So 1,000 cycles at 50% DOD becomes 1,000 cycles when I'm cycling between 50%-85%. Not the case of course (and Trojan never claimed it). I've learned to question evidence but it is still too easy to become lazy and accept something (and you go mad questioning everything, I did ).

I suppose advertising guys would have a much harder time if we weren't built to think that way.

Twice as white (as what)
Lasts longer (oh, 0.0001%?)
1,000 women agree (out of the 100,000 we actually asked)