Long story short, my dad has been fighting a battery issue in his truck for a while. Sits for a week and then hardly enough to roll it over. I checked the battery voltage from inside the cab and with just the head lights on, it drops to 11V, during start, it drops to 9.3V. I am thinking junk battery since I just charged it.
I brought the bat home for a bench test and with 10A of load, the bat drops to 12.5V!! That pretty much clued me in to bad cables or terminations. So, how about using my new ESR meter to test the resistance in the cables?
Also, I really need to get some firm numbers regarding lead acid start batteries in terms of charge rates, times, etc. I know they are different than deep cycle because they just dump all their charge at once so the CCA is not really a good estimation of capacity to a degree. IE, if a bat has 1000CCA, what kind of load/Vdrop should I be looking for?
Since I do some wrenching, I know under starting conditions, a bat dropping below 10.5V is something to be concerned about but especially in this case, there is little more to it. I do know the start current in this app was 360A.
I brought the bat home for a bench test and with 10A of load, the bat drops to 12.5V!! That pretty much clued me in to bad cables or terminations. So, how about using my new ESR meter to test the resistance in the cables?
Also, I really need to get some firm numbers regarding lead acid start batteries in terms of charge rates, times, etc. I know they are different than deep cycle because they just dump all their charge at once so the CCA is not really a good estimation of capacity to a degree. IE, if a bat has 1000CCA, what kind of load/Vdrop should I be looking for?
Since I do some wrenching, I know under starting conditions, a bat dropping below 10.5V is something to be concerned about but especially in this case, there is little more to it. I do know the start current in this app was 360A.