Second Dead Internal Battery D-180

[Fderfler]

My D-180 was installed by AMD in my AMD-made Zodiac CH601XL in October of 2006. Honestly, I do not know how long the 1st backup battery lasted, but at the 50 hour checkup it was dead, so AMD replaced it. Now, 60 days later, the backup battery is dead. It reads zero volts on the panel and the D-180 goes off with the master switch.

The plane is regularly flown several hours a week, so according to the specs the battery should have had plenty of time to charge even if the keep alive is not connected, but I assume that the keep alive is connected.

At the same time the second battery was installed, AMD upgraded the firmware to the latest rev (I saw something in the docs about the battery charging algorythm changing in the latest rev).

Any ideas about dying internal batteries in a D-180? Something we can tackle at the annual?
EVERYTHING else about the D-180 is just dandy! (Except I should have put a D10A in the panel for the right seat! My bad planning!)
-- FJD

 

[dynonsupport]

We've had a few little bugs with the D180's battery charging system. We spent a bunch of time with it over the last few months and really hope the firmware update that is just about to come out will fix all of this. We did tweak it in the last update too, which made it better, but it didn't fix everyone's issues.

We'd suggest waiting for this next update (hopefully on a few days away), installing it, and seeing if it fixes the problem and charges the battery. It's highly likely that the battery is fine, it's just not charged up.

Also, as a side note, it's almost always keep alive that causes the problem, so if you can pull a fuse or anything for keep alive, that will probably fix the problem as well, and you should see the battery start to charge at the next power-up.

 

[Fderfler]

Okay -- find a way to kill the keep-alive. It works for me! Thanks again (and again) for your great tech support! - FJD