We have a Lynx BMS + SmartLithium install on a sailboat (24v, 1000Ah). Just installed a Wakespeed WS-500 and now I’m struggling to get high power out of the alternator.
The Lynx BMS only advertises a CVL of 27V, when not on one of the monthly balancing cycles. It’s a big boat, with quite a long cable run from the alternator and other charging sources to the batteries. With about 1.5kW of charge, the voltage floats up to 27V in the engine room, which means the alternator will not deliver much more power than that.
If we could allow the CVL to go just a little higher, we could get a lot more power out of the alternator and into the batteries (possibly without even passing 27V at the batteries).
How do people typically deal with voltage drops like this between their DVCC devices and the batteries?
In this situation you could think about going to a daily absorption but reducing the absorption to a much shorter time. I know the NG version allows setting absorption to say 5 or 10 minutes, not sure about the older version. The battery monitor sync to 100% would need changing to match.
My observation (boat with WS500) is the same, a 13.5V CVL does not result in much charging, at 85% SOC I get 20A-25A into a 600Ah 12V bank. The trouble is if you go to say 13.7V (27.4V) this is above the full resting voltage and you do not want to sit at that for long periods.
Yeah, that seems like it would work. But I was hoping there was a better way. It really seems like there should be separate controls for charge cycling and periodic balancing.
Practically, I can get around that restriction by using Node RED logic to shut off most charging sources long before we get to 100%. I already do that, and rely on detecting the monthly CVL of 28.4 to let the batteries balance properly…
That’s a very good point. My sense wires are connected to the engine room bus bar. I should probably extend them to the battery bank. I hadn’t realised that the WS-500 will not take voltage sense from the BMS over CAN.
