When to charge my leisure battery

karmaan

Bought a numax 110ah leisure battery last april 2015, its currently reading 12.62 on the multimeter, I rarely hook up to mains, maybe twice, so the only charge it gets is while driving (average 3 hours max)
Question is am i damaging it or should i use my a ctek charger.
T

crabbypaddy

karmaan wrote: »

Bought a numax 110ah leisure battery last april 2015, its currently reading 12.62 on the multimeter, I rarely hook up to mains, maybe twice, so the only charge it gets is while driving (average 3 hours max)
Question is am i damaging it or should i use my a ctek charger.
T

Numax is basically a starter battery (1000A cold cranking, silver calcium plates, 24.6kg) so you don't need to worry too much about alternator charging damaging it. It would never be fully charged by the alternator though. Running a charging cycle with recondition cycle on the ctek would increase your capacity, but I would check if it needs watering regardless of its supposed maintainence free design.

Main things that shorten the life expectancy are overcharging, excessive discharge, excessive cycling and storing in discharged state. Numax is not a real deep cycle battery you'd want to keep cycles under 50% if you want it to last.

Aidan M M swears by them and he's got the returns list to prove it. They're decent and a promising weight for it's rating.

When to charge it? Any time the specific gravity is below 1.270 per cell until it is 1.275 per cell.

The Sidewards Man

Are you affiliated to Aidan sir?

None other than mutual respect.

The Sidewards Man

Say no more.

crabbypaddy

Sir Liamalot wrote: »

Aidan M M swears by them and he's got the returns list to prove it. They're decent and a promising weight for it's rating.

When to charge it? Any time the specific gravity is below 1.270 per cell until it is 1.275 per cell.

I'm surprised wasn't there loads of issues with failures and warranty a couple of years ago. Calcium plates are supposed too be hard for deep cycling and 1000cca implies very thin plates. Shouldn't require much watering though so maybe that the main source of failure in the average motor home.

crabbypaddy

Ok I have officially lost my mind I was mixing up elecsol and numax on the warranty / failure front.

Numax is manbat so should be no issue with warranty.

Are they! I can vouch for them myself so. I had a Manbat starter for 4 years. I retired it when it was holding 12.6V resting voltage and S.G. 1.260. Only because I don't want it pulling down my deep cycles across a split charger.
It's still in service over a year later. I store it off load charging it once every 3 months and use it to start the odd jalopy.
I abused it badly, flattened it twice and every time I tested it the cells were perfectly balanced.

Watered it twice in all it's days.

crabbypaddy

Thought my manbat lucas premium was on the way out earlier in the year, watered and equalised it and its performing brilliantly again, thought it was 3 years old until I dug out the receipt - march 2011.

I'm getting an ad for trojan batteries everytime I visit boards on my mobile, I'm blaming you Liam :P

No sympathy. Firefox + adblocker =:cool:

I only advise Trojans because Crowns are so hard to find in Eire.

karmaan

thanks for the advice lads, yes bought it on aidan mm s recommendation, he knows his stuff.