Peaklander

It's excellent to see this coming together. Great work and details.

I should have looked more closely at your radiator but it sounds like the connections are just the same as on my 300. Ok on the swarm comments too! It all helps. Thanks

Interesting. How do you deal with swarf when doing that, jam a vacuum cleaner pipe next to the drill? Also how do the oil pipes locate there, I can’t see any thread?

I think mine are garden sprayers. They hold 5l and I also have two. They have made the oil changes much easier.

I have two of the Draper type but bought from Aldi’s “aisles of randomness”. They are also up to the job and as Mr@V8 Freak has shown me, you can add a tyre fitting and hook it up to an air pressure source.

Any restriction causes a pressure drop across it doesn’t it? I think that’s what the filter comparison says.

Come on Cornish, that’s enough pics of the gear, get out there and get searching!

I suppose a healthy battery has to follow a discharge path over time, that is determined by the voltage it can sustain at a specified current drain (load). Maybe if it is in poor condition it can never follow that or even start at the right point.

What he says ^^^^. Amps are no good if they can't flow. For that you need to create a potential difference. Once the pd between Alt and Aux battery reduces, as the battery charge moves towards the voltage from the alternator, then the amps reduce to nothing. If the battery is still not at 100% then it will never be. With a split charge setup, putting the (much more highly charged state) Starter battery in parallel will only serve to exacerbate this.

When I responded to the OP @roamingyak, I pointed out that the smartpass unit is only needed when there’s a big bank of aux battery not a single one. I run it alone. About ‘nearly’ at alternator volts, the problem is that it only ever gets ‘nearly’ charged and over time this will lead to early failure.

The unit linked to above, the RSCDC30 is a bit cheaper than the ctek D250SA (£190 v £220 plus pp). It looks good value but one thing to note is that it doesn't provide any top-up into the engine battery which the ctek does but only if the aux battery is fully charged. Also it's bulkier which might or might not be an issue. It does look as though you can monitor the Amps being pushed into the battery though and that's a nice comfort point. The other point is that it doesn't matter how many Amps you have spinning out of the alternator, if the voltage of the aux battery is nearly but not quite at alternator volts then very little of that available power will actually arrive into the battery. If you load the alternator with a heated screen or two plus a few headlights then there will be even less chance of that top-up occurring.

As soon as the battery people told me that my aux wasn’t getting fully charged on my split charge connection, I bought a Ctek charger. I got the extra little socket with rings on the end and wired it permanently to the aux with the socket poking out under the passenger seat. Whenever I could I connected the charger, using a mains hookup at campsites but otherwise at home. The battery responded well. Then I added a 100W panel and used the Ctek controller and never looked back. The move from coolbox to fridge, CFX35W was an enormous step (in £ too) but last year in Ireland with 4/5 of the trip in rain and cloud we never hooked up to the mains at all and the batteries have been fully charged and hold up well.

Don’t forget that the Ctek unit we are talking about is a solar panel controller as well. It isn’t just replacing a vsr. (Yes I know there are cheaper controllers too). So two power source inputs and two outputs are available here. We also know that the main function is to lift the output voltages to whatever they need to be, independently of each other, thereby trying very hard to replenish the two batteries to 100%. I don’t know why the Ctek unit can’t be trusted. After all many people are using their mains driven smart chargers and finding that their batteries remain healthy for much longer than before.

I have a panel mount voltmeter and can switch between the two batteries with a little toggle so I can at least see that bit but no current of course. We have probably done this to death 😀 but what charging voltage do you achieve? Can you see 14.4v all the time?

Hi FF thanks for posting. I agree with all that. It’s the ability to complete the entire charge that is the issue and it where I still think that a vsr can’t do the job 100% especially on old alternators That’s why I’m happy to use the Ctek unit as I know that the aux battery is now getting a complete charge. As I said, I was lucky to have not damaged it irreparably and now that I have the solar panel fitted the whole system is working well. In fact I have just refitted the panel today and watched happily as the volts ramped up ( both batteries are agm and the charger is configured for that).