sfaust
Posts: 1790
Joined: 9/6/2002
From: Boston,
MA, USA
Status: offline
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by tsaldivar
Nothing against the Alpha charger, BUT if you've never read, or learned of the huge technological advances in charging techniques and benefits of the Sirius AND Schulze (not forgetting other good ones as well) one is sadly limiting themselves to the belief that there is NO chargers out there that eleminate the need to cycle your packs!!!!!!![/QUOTE]
But this presupposes that cycling is only limited to the function of eliminating memory effect. It would be sad for someone to purchase something like the Sirus Charge Pro, assuming they will not need a cycler based on its claims. Only later to find out that while they may or may not need to cycle the packs for the purpose of reversing memory effects, they still need to go out a buy a cycler so they can properly cycle their packs for the purpose of monitoring the packs overall health and uncovering signs of weak or aged packs, packs with abnormal high self discharge rates, reduced capacity, and so on.
Cycling to reduce memory is only one use for cycling. No matter what charging method is used, from a simple C/10, to the advanced charging and termination methods, cycling is still a major part of overall battery maintenance and management for a variety of reasons. A charger can not eliminate the requirement for cycling, unless it eliminates all the failure modes of the battery, or provides alternate methods to test for those failure modes.
Any charger without the ability to cycle a battery is only half the solution we require for our airplane packs. I would not trust my high dollar airplanes or jets to any battery that didn't include regular cycling for determining proper capacity, self discharge rates, capacity usage logging, effects from pack aging and loss of capacity, and so on. In fact, even though I cycle each pack about 4 times a year, I never cycle them for the purposes of reducing memory effect.
Any good battery maintenance system will include charge functions, discharge functions, and the ability to measure and display the amount of charge put in, and the amount of current taken out, time on charge, and current voltage both unloaded and loaded. If the charger doesn't have all these functions, they must be purchased in separate units. Without all these functions, you can not determine with certainty the health of a specific pack. You can guess, but you will not know! And I like to know when I trust the battery with the safety of people on the ground, and the $7K worth of airplane wrapped around it. 
So don't think you can get around cycling, if you really want to know the health of your battery packs, and not just guess on secondary indicators.
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Stephen
http://www.StephenFaust.com/giantscalerc - My Hangar
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