Bay Area Soaring Associates (BASA)

I flew the DG quite a bit the past week and thoroughly enjoyed getting back in the saddle. It is in great shape and flies as beautifully as ever.

I did notice on three occasions that the previous pilot had charged the batteries from the front charger. What this does is charge the main (removable) battery and leaves the tail (normally used for the transponder) battery uncharged. I reread the charging procedures (in the February Bugle) and the proper procedure for keeping both batteries fully charged is:

1). to connect the solar charger to the rear seat receptacle AND

2). remove the main battery and charge it with the charger in the BASA trailer.

I think the front panel receptacle is mistakenly being used as it is slightly easier for installing the solar panel over the nose. Also it is more convenient to just solar charge the main battery and avoid a trip to the trailer. This is bad for the tail battery which is much more costly and very inconvenient to replace (read glider down time and/or loss of transponder usage)!

The battery master toggles must be in the center (off) position for charging (post flight).

Note that the upper battery toggle is canted to the right slightly so when the toggle is in the center (off) position it visually appears to be in the tail battery (on) position. I recommend that the toggles be manipulated full left and right (gently) to ascertain they are finally in the center (off) position post flight.

Charlie

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 8:59 pm and is filed under tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.