question

murphy-r avatar image
murphy-r asked

Centaur switches to float skipping bulk & absorb on discharged batteries

We have an existing Centaur charger charging our AGM house bank. We noticed on our most recent anchoring that the Centaur charger is not going into bulk or absorb on our AGM house bank and goes straight to float per the BMV. Worked fine in the past. When I go now and look at the data over several cycles where we would run a generator to charge the bank we don't see the Centaur even hitting bulk / absorption.

You can see the two attached graphs that display battery voltage for our 8 AGM battery house bank. AGM are 5-6 years old now. It is almost like the Centaur.

The Centaur has a second battery (Genset) it charges and it does go through the Bulk/Absorb/Float per the voltage readouts.

Could this be caused by the AGM being at the end of their life and somehow causing the charger to trip early??

bmv-house-2.pngbmv-house-1.png


battery charging
bmv-house-1.png (145.0 KiB)
bmv-house-2.png (145.1 KiB)
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1 Answer
stevesea avatar image
stevesea answered ·

Could you figure it out? I'm having the same issue with a Centaur 12/60 with the DIP switches in AGM. I also have a 12/30 with the AGM setting and it seems to be doing the absorption stage (I don't have a time history, but at least it holds the absorption voltage during 30 mins, while the 12/60 goes to float voltage after a couple of seconds).


I reached out to the local distributor but they're saying they have never seen a Centaur charger fail partially, it "either works or it doesn't". But all my tests seem to show it doesn't hold the absorption voltage, which it should hold for 4 hours according to the manual.

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