12v lead battery suddenly drained.

Sm00th

10 mW
Joined
Aug 15, 2017
Messages
28
Hello :)

I have a bike with 4× 12v batteries. 48v total. I installed a low watt led lamp on one battery because it is 12 v. After a few charges I noticed the battery with lamp didnt charge much / at all. It was 12v and the other 3 batteries were 13.7 each. What the frock?
 
Yes.. when you're sucking electricity out of just one of the series of batteries... it doesn't flow into the low one like it does when they're in parallel.

And you should be topping them off with an individual 12v charger to keep them balanced over time anyway. With your basic 4 lead battery with no balancer setup, as the batteries age the voltages drift off as the charger just sees the total voltage of the 48v pack, and misses one going to high volts, like 15v, and one staying down low..... extended low voltage and overcharging are the two fastest ways to kill a lead battery.
 
Yes--and remember that each of the 12v batteries is actually 6x 2v cells that ought to also be occasionally individually balance charged...but you can't do anything about that cuz they're sealed up inside. :( So eventually the batteries fail because one of those 6 cells gets damaged from too low or too high, etc.
 
Hmm I charged so the drained battery is 12.9 and The other 3 are at 13.1 and 13.2, 13.2.
I moved the lamp to the 13.1 battery and now when I charge I have two batteries at 13.2 and two batteries at 15.7... I hoped I couldav had the lamp still on one battery and just use the individual charge once in a while. But I guess thats not possible?
 
Im trying to find somewhere to buy a dc dc 48volt -> 12v. I guess that would solve my problem?

Im about to add even more stuff. A led ramp with 126watt so I guess I need a dc dc which can provide enought current?

Is this dc dc overkill?
https://www.cclcomponents.com/victron-orion-tr-48v-to-24v-120w-5a-isolated-dc-dc-converter?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhq-Ara2z1gIVnIeyCh2p_wkbEAQYASABEgIXvPD_BwE

Got any suggestions so I buy a proper dc dc which can provide enough for my led ramp and more things like horn haha. :)
 
Well, the picture of the linked device clearly shows it does not do what you want, it says it's a 8-17v input and 20-30v output. :/

The specs elsewhere on the page says it is 48v to 24v, which also won't do what you want.

BTW, if the lights on the ramp and elsewhere are automotive types, they're actually designed to run on at least 13-14v to get the right brightness. 12v isn't enough. So you'll want to verify their actual input specs before settling on a DC-DC unit.

(i.e.: a motorcycle LED taillight/brakelight unit I used a while back had "14.5v" molded into it's plastic housing).


I don't know which specific DC-DC you'd be best using, but there are quite a lot of them out there. Unfortunately it's hard to do a search specifically for these here on ES because of the way the search engine works; it can't look for "DC-DC". :(

The best I could do is this
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/search.php?keywords=12v*&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=titleonly&sk=t&sd=d&sr=topics&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search
which finds a whole bunch of irrelevant stuff, though there are relevant threads in there that should be mostly obvious by their titles. :(


Myself, I have used a number of "wallwart" supplies (AC-power adapters that plug into the wall) made for various other kinds of electronics, to run lights on my bikes. I just wire the bike's battery output (via a switch) to the AC prongs on the wallwarts, and the lights to the output wires on the wallwarts.

They don't always work on DC input, but a lot of the ones marked as "90vac - 230vac input" do, as long as the DC input voltage is high enough. For instance, they generally didn't work on my "36v" batteries, but generally did on my "48v" and "52v" batteries.
 
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