@crutschow and tcmtech, may be wrong but ,think the two of you are talking different animals here. Cruts - - cells, all lead acid batteries I'm aware of are made up of series CELL's in one case making up a battery. tcm - - aren't you talking parallel BATTERIES of series cells?

Yes. Common standard battery units of any size wired in parallel. Its been used successfully for over a century and half on billions of applications that in the majority of applications used nothing more than basic constant voltage sources to maintain them.

 

Yes. Common standard battery units of any size wired in parallel. Its been used successfully for over a century and half on billions of applications that in the majority of applications used nothing more than basic constant voltage sources to maintain them.

That's true and is good practice if you keep total discharges shallow, recharge currents limited IRT to total battery bank capacity and use batteries designed for that type of service. The typical flooded lead acid battery has several states of operation that can be roughly modeled as two wells (or more precisely using the more complex diffusion model). The first 'well' is easily available plate surface charge of the total capacity. In a multistage recharging system this is usually handled by the absorption stage with a constant voltage that results in reduced current until the cell is fully charged. The second well is the bound charge that has to driven through the surface charge well to be used. This is the bulk constant current stage until the absorption voltage level is reached in a multistage charging system.

If you quickly discharge a car type FLA battery (like when cranking over a car) and then let it rest for a period of time you will notice that it seems to recover charge. No additional charge was added to the cell but what did happen is that energy from the bound charge well moved (electrochemically) into the available charge well for cranking amps. A typical cranking battery is designed to have large available charge wells so it can deliver high currents for a short time. Deep discharge and traction type batteries with usually designed with much thicker plates that have more energy in the bound well because they have to deliver moderate currents for long periods of time.

What type of lead acid battery and the best type of charging system depends on the specific application. Lead acid batteries are still common and popular because they can be abused and charged in non-optimal conditions unlike some other battery types that are known to explode or burn with the incorrect profile.