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Trolley battery sudden death

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Hi all. We have a couple of those 200Ah trolleys. One suddenly stopped delivering any output during loadshedding. Floats at 13.6V but won't carry a 200W load when the power drops. Less than a year old. I know we had extreme loadshedding but is this normal?

 

  • Author

No idea ... I will check. But I think part of the problem is the charge rate is set to 10A. Just not enough recharge between loadshedding cycles. Will up to max (20A) when I get in.

1 hour ago, Scubadude said:

No idea ... I will check. But I think part of the problem is the charge rate is set to 10A. Just not enough recharge between loadshedding cycles. Will up to max (20A) when I get in.

Yes so when the next bout of loadshedding hits, the battery gets depleted below the recommended minimum SOC of 50%. This kills the battery and a 1 year max lifetime for the batteries is not unusual. A friend has one of these trolleys and 1 week past warranty the batteries rapidly declined. The supplier now only gives 6 months warranty as it is common for the lead acids not to last a year. I think the quality of some of the lead acid batteries is below average to start with...

4 hours ago, Scubadude said:

Hi all. We have a couple of those 200Ah trolleys. One suddenly stopped delivering any output during loadshedding. Floats at 13.6V but won't carry a 200W load when the power drops. Less than a year old. I know we had extreme loadshedding but is this normal?

 

lead acid/gel batteries? They're probably kaput. I have yet to see these trolley type setups survive loadshedding. My old setup barely made it through stage 2 loadshedding, and was dead after 8 months

5 hours ago, madness_za said:

lead acid/gel batteries? They're probably kaput. I have yet to see these trolley type setups survive loadshedding. My old setup barely made it through stage 2 loadshedding, and was dead after 8 months

Same here.
AGM battery degraded after ~8months.
I was provided a trolley ups as part of WFH to keep my laptop, 23" screen, router, wifi, ont, vpn gateway working during load shedding.
The load was ~100W.
There were a few thousands other staff also provided with the same setup.

The inverter, by default would allow discharge to 10.5V - which is bad.
Curious Case of 50% Depth of Discharge for Lead Acid Battery | EcoSoch

Since it was provided by work we were not allowed to change any of the inverter settings.
The expectation was that ~100W for two hours of load shedding would not drop below 50% SoC.
Unfortunately we experienced a few suburb outages which ran into 6+ hours each.
Suffice to say, that after 8 months the battery degraded to the extent that it would not sustain ~100W for 2 hours.
They replaced the battery at ~8 months - most of my colleagues had to have the battery replaced within the first year. 
I configured the inverter with 12.06 (50%) shutdown.

Since then I've upgraded (see signature for details).

  • Author
5 hours ago, system32 said:

I configured the inverter with 12.06 (50%) shutdown.

Looks like my inverter has only two settings - 10A/20A charge and narrow/wide (something to do with input voltage).  Or am I missing something?

The supplier now carries this handy notice on their webiste ... seems I'm not the only one.

image.png.be396691a871e64699aac0e9d1a7d564.png

Edited by Scubadude

22 minutes ago, Scubadude said:

Looks like my inverter has only two settings - 10A/20A charge and narrow/wide (something to do with unpur voltage).  Or am I missing something?

The supplier now carries this handy notice on their webiste ... seems I'm not the only one.

image.png.be396691a871e64699aac0e9d1a7d564.png

Mine has a LCD display & keypad, found the manual online, changed parameter 19:
image.png.41d253d3c8a04c0c140604b75638d765.png

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