Technical Notes
Battery Charge Factor (BCF)
Some energy is lost both when recharging and discharging a battery. The FLEXnet DC compensates for these losses by discounting the amp-hours charging the battery, meaning it doesn’t count every hour used for recharging as actually recharging. Some of them are lost due to heat and gassing. The FLEXnet DC’s default BCF is 94, which means for every 100 amp hours of charge to the battery, only 94 are shown in the amp hour display for a BCF of 94%. This means 6% of the amp hours is lost.
As the system goes through a few recharging cycles, the range of state-of-charge (SOC) percentages will vary, but should fall into a predictable range. This allows the user to change the BCF if necessary for more efficient recharging. If the SOC displays as full before the battery charge settings are met (either before the time setting or amp hour setting is satisfied), the BCF should be lowered because it’s assuming too many amp hours have been recharging the battery. By lowering the BCF, the FLEXnet DC will read more hours as being unused due to inefficiency.