Do I need a larger Centaur charger?

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wings45 asked Oct 14, '20

Do I need a larger Centaur charger?

When building my boat we increased the size of the battery bank significantly from the base spec (from 324 Ah to 1,000 Ah) and also upgraded to Victron Super Cycle AGM. The charger was upgraded from a 12/30 to a 12/60. The thinking was that shore power is generally limited in amps but usually there is plenty of time. However it seems that we're having trouble getting the bank fully charged on shore power. Now reviewing the Victron spec sheet I see that not reaching full charge may be caused by undersizing the charger presumably because the second stage is on a 4 hour timer. Any thoughts on this? Should I replace the Centaur 12/60 with a 12/100? If so will shore power typically be adequate to power the charger?

battery charging charger AGM Battery

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Answer 1 · 2020-10-14T16:58:26Z

Matthias Lange - DE answered · Oct 14, 2020 at 04:58 PM

A lead acid/AGM/Gel battery should be charged with 10-15% of the capacity.
So for your 1000Ah you should have a charging current of 100-150A.

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Answer 2 · 2020-10-14T20:39:08Z

jwfrary answered · Oct 14, 2020 at 08:39 PM

Arguably you need a a larger charger. A 3000 watt multi plus would be very suitable

With a bank of that size a multiplus could enhance your boating experience not to mention the charging profiles are customisable to your batteries.

You can use it as a battery charger most of the time and just turn the inverter side on as needed

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wings45 commented · Oct 15, 2020 at 07:04 PM

The electricians at the yard prefer to separate the charging and inverter functions which makes sense for my use primarily away from marinas and shore power. I have a Phoenix 3000 inverter. Most of my charging needs are handled by 3 375W solar panels each with a separate SmartSolar 100/50 MPPT charge controller. But I was concerned when my house bank was not brought to even near 100% after more than 48 hours of shore charging.

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jwfrary wings45 commented · Oct 16, 2020 at 07:49 PM

Hi,

that’s fine if you have the room, two fairly heavy boxes replaced with one.

However combining the inverter and the charger gives you so much more functionality when it comes to management of low power shore plugs. Worth thinking about.

I would consider the two separately only when what I wanted to power was a mission critical bit of equipment, like a sat com in a hospital!

Inverter charger is the modern and tbh more sophisticated way to do it .

that and a multi plus is only a smidge more expensive than a skylla Tg

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