Charging lead acid batteries without electrcity

General Discussion
#1

I try to learn how to charge lead acid batteries without using electricity and I found at least three ways.

Generally this doesn’t work with car batteries. You must use primitive first generation hand poured Plante batteries. This is directed toward large 1m X 1m plate size.

There are at least two recycle cycles. You must renew the battery acid and then you must recover the lead.

Generally 50 lbs of lead makes a kw. A car battery has 11 1 ft x 1 ft plates or 11 sq feet.

Sulphuric Acid is a little hard to make.

  1. Melting the plates. You can recover the PbSO4 from molten lead and repour the plates. This lots of work and you earn $.25 every time you melt 50 lbs of lead.

  2. Scrubbing - use a heavy grit wet sand paper and a Hazmat A suit. Again you get $.25 for sanding a 3.25’ x 3.25’ lead plate

3). Weak Sodium Hydroxide. This looks promising because you can do bulk flushes but the two compounds are solvent in the wash solution. Neither compounds are particularly nasty, one recycles easy the the other is a commodity.

Ill be working with one. I went shopping for cast iron pot and I have an old battey to melt and I saved some plywood to make molds but its pretty thick I think I need thinner plywood and I have NaOH. I run out of steam right after shopping.

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#2

Sounds like more trouble than its worth to me. And— sounds like you still have to use a lot of other resources, too. For example— the energy needed to melt the lead.
What am I missing here?

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#3

Sure, lead melting is easy because we have a biomass gasifier that makes 2100F flame when lead melts at 700F. This makes the gasifier useful… You need to melt the plates once so you dont do this often. I acknowledged this renewal approach as technically but not economically feasible.

You still need to refurbish the battery acid and that takes heat energy via the gasifier.

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