Blimey talk about time flying, this is the first weekend I’ve been down the boat since New years day. Was hesitating whether to leave it till next weekend and come down with Helen, as she’s in Newcastle this weekend. Good job i didn’t.
At some stage in the last few days, (the only time i didn’t check online that everything was ok) the power must have gone off, stupidly we had left a heater on and through the inverter it completely drained the house batteries, doh! When i got down on Friday night, they had about 7 volts left in them. This can be quite disastrous if there old batteries, as older batteries have sulphated more, as the plates break down the sediment sits on the bottom of that battery floor and gets between the plates, letting them drop this low allows the plates to fail and then they over sulphate (in short they’re knackered) but as these were that old and haven’t been used in anger they should be ok.
So how do you charge a completely dead battery? Most charges just don’t have the capability to charge from that dead. Well a little trick i learnt from Kent Bergsma on Youtube, basically you need to get a bit of life into the battery, you need to get it up to about 12.3v (watch Kents video he tells you), but in short you have to connect a good battery onto the dead one with jumper leads and leave for 4-5 hrs until the voltage in the dead battery is high enough to use the charger. So i got the leads from the car and jumped the starter battery onto the house battery, once i got one fully charged i did the same with the other 3. Used up most of my weekend, but saves spending another £1000 on new ones.
anyway apart from that she’s in great shape, were back down again next weekend to put sail on and give her a wash.
