On Tuesday, April 3, 2018 at 1:51:03 AM UTC-4, wrote:
... Have fried more than one battery when the charger did not detect peak and shut of (Or float) before the battery got hot.

Yes any time the battery gets hot it's bad for it. I've had batteries get hot sometimes when using a supposedly "smart" charger that was too small. Such a charger maintains a constant current until the voltage rises to something like 14.5V, and with too small a charge current relative to the size of the battery that may never happen. Alternatively the problem may be in the second stage, when the charger maintains a fairly high constant voltage and looks for the current to drop to, say, 5% of its capacity - with a 0.7A charger and a 12AH battery that may never happen. Sometimes I use a "dumb" charger that maintains a constant voltage of about 14V, that's safe (for a couple of days) but slow.