EarthX battery for Experimental Aircraft

[Cubonaut875]

So if we have the Optimate charger, which I do, I can leave that on charge as I have been doing. Good idea or bad idea?

 

[Neal]

So if we have the Optimate charger, which I do, I can leave that on charge as I have been doing. Good idea or bad idea?

According to EarthX the charger is temperature aware. When I install mine I'm going to monitor it off the charger and see how long it can go. I prefer not to have it on charger unless needed. The SBS-J16 has to live on a charger, not sure EarthX is the same. If there a stinking battery disconnect switch it would solve this problem too to eliminate parasitic drains.

 

[ve6yeq]

According to the Garmin documentation that I have read, there is some "keep alive" power supplied to things such as the GTX 345R (to store the last known GPS data) so there will always be a very small draw from the battery. So connecting ground power seems like a good idea to me...

 

[Neal]

For those with the ETX-900 and a G3X, I'd appreciate it if you could go to the CONFIG side and tell me what the params are for your battery voltages for green, yellow, red bands. Thank you.

I emailed EarthX, very responsive which is nice, and they pointed me to the manual, so I RTFM'd and found this which I'll set once I find the right sensor location in the G3X config:

 

[Cubonaut875]

Now you have to call the wonderful people at Garmin and they will tell you RTFM, you will read the 464 page manual and not find your answer, you will then call them and they will give you the hidden combination of buttons to press that will reveal the screen you need

 

[Neal]

Can’t wait to put my EarthX in. I believe the SBS-J16 is too weak for this plane. Today had failed first start and second attempt barely turned over. Just came off of weeks on the charger.

 

[Neal]

In talking with Pete from CubCrafters yesterday I inquired about the CubCrafters settings for EarthX battery installs. He sent me the chart below. I'm probably going to modify my values, for example anything above 13.0V in my opinion is in the green band. 12.9 down to around 12.5 will be my yellow band, below 12.5 will be red. I have to check what I already configured and where I set alerts. I'll take a screenshot when I sort this out.

Also in the chat Pete mentioned that simply the voltage alerts in the G3X are sufficient for warnings about the battery health which is great to hear as I bought the battery fault light and don't intend to use it. I agree that voltage values alone should be sufficient to monitor what's going on with the battery.

Here are LiFePO4 battery state of charge which is very different from AGM (lead) batteries.

 

[Cubonaut875]

In talking with Pete from CubCrafters yesterday I inquired about the CubCrafters settings for EarthX battery installs. He sent me the chart below. I'm probably going to modify my values, for example anything above 13.0V in my opinion is in the green band. 12.9 down to around 12.5 will be my yellow band, below 12.5 will be red. I have to check what I already configured and where I set alerts. I'll take a screenshot when I sort this out.

Also in the chat Pete mentioned that simply the voltage alerts in the G3X are sufficient for warnings about the battery health which is great to hear as I bought the battery fault light and don't intend to use it. I agree that voltage values alone should be sufficient to monitor what's going on with the battery.

View attachment 304​

Here are LiFePO4 battery state of charge which is very different from AGM (lead) batteries.

View attachment 305​

That's not even close to what I sent you on my panel. Very interesting indeed

 

[Neal]

That's not even close to what I sent you on my panel. Very interesting indeed

I highly recommend raising your seat and verifying what battery you have installed, make sure you have an EarthX (blue) or a AGM (orange). Based on your production order experience, I don't know what you have under your seat

 

[Neal]

I'm sure I'll be tweaking this more but this is 90% there for what I want for my settings. I wasn't sure how common values worked between two settings. For example should yellow range + alert be 12.7 to 12.9 and the yellow range below it 12.9 to 13.0? The common value of 12.9 is what I'm not sure is right to set or if the values need to be different.