Lou,
There is nothing in your message that definitively tells me that
you have either a bad cell or a bad battery. "Minor corrosion on
one terminal" is normal behavior, especially if the installer
didn't coat the terminals at installation. "One cell was not using
as much water as all the rest" is a matter of perception. You
write yourself that "everything looked fine." It seems to me that
you're jumping to conclusions based on the comment of another
Wrench without doing sufficient testing first. Get the client to
put a measured load on the system without charge. This isn't hard
to do with an amp-hour meter in the system - you want a steady
load of about 55 A (a C/20 load). If you have a bad cell, it'll
show up soon enough.
For now, I'm on Interstate's side.
Hope this helps,
Allan
Allan Sindelar
al...@positiveenergysolar.com
NABCEP Certified Photovoltaic
Installer
NABCEP Certified Technical Sales Professional
New Mexico EE98J Journeyman Electrician
Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Positive Energy, Inc.
3209 Richards Lane (note new address)
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87507
505 424-1112
www.positiveenergysolar.com
On 3/15/2013 2:38 PM, Lou Russo wrote:
Hello Wrenches,
This is my first go around here in the mailing list. I ve been a
"lurker" for years, I much appreciate all the insight you all have
provided.
Here is the situation:
I have a client with 12 Interstate UL16HCs (24v system, 3 x 4
battery bank) purchased and installed exactly 12 months ago.
After 5 months of being installed he thought one of the
batteries may be going bad because of some minor corrosion on
one terminal and one cell was not using as much water as all the
rest . So I disconnected that string after a full charge and let
it rest for 8 hours. I then checked the specific gravity with
the refractometer as well as the voltage of each battery.
Everything looked fine. I called the Interstate warehouse let
them know the situation and asked what they could do for me,
they said "nothing" of course. So nothing happened. Fast
forward. After speaking to another wrench (I am always up for
clients getting more info) who mentioned something about a bad
batch of batteries that Interstate received around the time of
installation, my client wants to do something. I know the first
part of the following question has been hashed out in some
detail already, the second part is the most important here...
Assuming the one battery is bad, is it worth it to replace
the one battery at this stage and call it good? If not, should I
or Interstate be responsible for replacing the whole battery
bank?
Thanks for any and all insight.
Cheers,
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