Electrical – How to mitigate voltage drop

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I currently have a sump pump in my basement that is normally powered by plugging it into an outlet. When we lose power, I have a 100 amp hour marine deep cycle lead acid battery along with a 1200 watt power inverter to power the 1/3 horsepower sump pump.
The power inverter has an automatic shutoff when the voltage of the battery drops below 10.5 volts and because of that shutoff, the power inverter will start to power the pump however I can see on the display that the battery is dropping to 9 volts and then shortly after the inverter cuts the power. I was wondering how would I be able to mitigate this voltage drop in order to prolong the batteries from dropping below 10.5 volts?

sump pump nameplate

Best Answer

Since you keep a 6 amp charger on the battery you may have boiled the water out of the battery it shows a full charge until a load is put on the battery then the voltage drops because there is not enough liquid to maintain the voltage/ current demand. If you can open the battery and add distilled water and this may provide some run time. Next find a quality Float charger, these do not over charge the battery like a trickle charger will and boil off the water. Last you might want to look at a larger battery, placing batteries in parallel will increase the time the system will run but if one battery is bad or has low internal resistance it will discharge the other battery unless there is an isolator. A larger deep cycle battery is what you need standard car batteries are not designed for deep cycle. Get as large deep cycle battery as you can afford (higher amp hours) golf cart batterys are also a good way to go many of these are 6v so it would take 2 in series.