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As the cheaper SCA charger does, however the SCA does 6 cycles over a 24 hour period before it gives up.
Battery Chargers
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As the cheaper SCA charger does, however the SCA does 6 cycles over a 24 hour period before it gives up.
That's not a bad thing then. If the battery is recoverable, an hour of 15V at about 2A will put a surface charge on the plates which will translate into something readable by the charger when it turns the juice off. If the voltage falls away straight away, there's probably bad sulphation in at least one cell, and that's what the C-Tek's "Recover" function is designed to fight against.
It isn't always successful and sometimes you need to do it more than once. I've successfully recovered a couple of deep cycle flooded cell batteries but I've never had a lot of joy with gels - mostly because gels don't sulphate as much as they produce gas bubbles at the plate/gel interface which denies electron flow (they can still sulphate, but that's not their major killer). The recovery voltage is enough to kill the gel too - they hate being hit with much more than 14.1V.
Some chargers (and amazingly, the 20A solar regulator I bought from Jaycar to manage power in my caravan does this) have an "equalisation" function. Every two months (or so), the charger will pass 16V (yes, you read that right) over the battery for a couple of hours (it varies the current but holds the voltage high). This is designed to fizz the electrolyte, reducing or removing sulphation and basically mixing things around so that the chemical nature of the battery fluid is even all the way through the battery (do a search for 12V stratification if you're interested). This is a gel killer too - and it's pretty damn fast too. If you want to see a gel dead, just do this to it!
If you have flooded batteries, you really need to either closely monitor the fluid levels, or only perform an equalisation when you (after you) have filled the cells up - and then check the specific gravity when it's complete and top up as needed afterwards too.
