Intro Battery Bank and Salvaging

No, it’s just going to sit on a shelf in the garage 99% of the time and get hauled inside/to my truck as needed. I will find a small tote that can fit it for protecting my floor though.

I guess part of my question was directed more at the full charging. I heard somewhere that for optimal battery lifespan, that something like the 0-80% “bulk charge” should be faster, 80-95% should be much slower (or maybe lower voltage), and 95%-storage should be a trickle.

Would a constant trickle from drained hurt the battery over a tiered smart charge?

I can honestly say I don’t know… I would probably have a trickle charger and a 4 amp charger myself. 3 or 4 times a year I would give it a full cycle 50% discharge then charge her back up. Rest of the time trickle charger on a certain schedule… lots of forums out there to read up on.

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I have a (Wal-Mart branded) Schumacher MC-1 battery charger / maintainer that I have had for years. It has (with patience) coaxed many marginal 6 or 12 Volt auto, cycle, lawnmower,and deep cycle batteries back to life. If you forget and leave it on, no worries! that is what it is made for. Less than $20.00 if you shop around.

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Well BrianHWA
As I had said on my grid gone down topic I’ve been trying to recover a group 30H battery been in the John Deere tractor.
The group 30H’s are a ~78 pound diesel starting battery. Lead post terminals. Work good for banks too. The group 31’s truck/deisel battries are a bit better with threaded stud terminals.
This group 30H of mine is ~11 years old. I’ve let it this tractor sit now un-needed and unused for about 16 months.
I cannot get this battry to now take in any chrging amps even voltage boosted to 16.5 volts. The normal lead sulfate that has formed as a normal part of a discharge cycle has now barnacle-like solidified and will not now convert back releasing the sulfur molecules back into the electrolyte.
Those high-frequency battery restorers are suppose to micro fracture this up to (way-over-hopefully go back into solution) and/or settle into the bottom of the cell.
As has been pointed out you Will have a plate loss of material then.
You Will have the electrolytic weaken from the sulfur tied up loss.

For mine now I will remove it and use the slamming technique. You carefully raise the battry up an slam it down flat onto a concrete slab. This fractires the sulphate criust. Shakes it down below the plates.
Hey! This works about 50% of the time.
Not works. You over-slammed too hard and cracked the case. Leaks then. Fractured a cell to cell plate connector/strap - Open circuit. Or just got unlucky and the sulfate chunks collect and wedges between plates causing then plate shorting. You will know this from that cell overheating boiling on recharging. The battery from then on self discharging internally.
A “re-covered” battery will NEVER have close to it’s rated design capacity ever again.

My tractor’s now going to need a new repacement battery.

Undercharging. Leaving in state of discharge can be just as battry damaging as over-charging.
Lead-acid batteries start to age as soon ans the electrolyte is put in.
Just like your body. Your use of it will determine its ultimate service life.

Regards
Steve unruh

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I decided a while ago that the cost of a battery was keeping it under warranty. Quality or no, they all live or die by the treatment they get. I’ll buy the Walmart brand ones with a now 5 year warranty… if it dies after that it’s just the cost of doing business.

Only time I went the other way was on our main ultra-reliable vehicle, when the key decided to no longer come out of the ignition - meaning a couple relays and other micro-current drains began to drag down the battery. This vehicle received a red-top Optima, as an experiment. Yes they’re pricey. But supposedly they come back from the dead more times and last longer under distress. A knife switch in line stops the drain, so with some driver training, we’ve ended our battery woes. I have great confidence in the Optima, and should the vehicle die (or be totaled) a cheap replacement will be swapped in.

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Good tip on the slamming Steve, learned that one as a kid in high school. Another kid I went to school with turned me on to rolling them down a hill. Thought he was crazy but hey, you cant wreck junk. Nothing to loose so why not. Has bought me some time more than once. down the line to lawn mowers and such till sold by the pound. It aint over till it’s over.

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Yes! on the “down the line”.
Back in the 80’s one branch of the Rural family used Diehards exclusivly. And they were Ford lovers.
I’d fit into the JD tractors paralleled highest amp group 24F’s. Couple of three years there. Then a couple of three years into the V-8 vehicles. Then a couple/three years into the six and four cylinder vehicles.
Yes, ending in a rider lawn mower.

Ha! I’ve been trying to do this now with the Optima’s.

Use it up. Wear it out. Make do. Or do without.
Steve Unruh

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Never heard of slamming.

My Grandfather was a old time machinist and mechanic from the 1930s
Anyhow he had many odd ways about him.

One of them was to wash out a sulphated battery and then put it in a steel wash tube and start a fire under it.
Slowly boil it all day to clean the plate.

Kind of stands to reason it could work.
I am middle aged now and have lots of years under my belt in the trade.
i never tried the old man’s trick but I can tell you I tried all kinds of additives and desulphator systems and non o them really work very well for me.

Buying a new battery works pretty good though.
I bought a new battery for my 05 VW this fall.
I got 10 years out of the OEM battery and think that’s bloody hard to beat…

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I learned about battery slamming from Dad. He also applies side slamming with a short 2x4… :scream:

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I’m going to try it.
Most of the time though its still a spent battery.

Today I saw 4 newTO-5 batteries in the recycle box at work.
Someone ordered something wrong.
Sure would like to have them but they go to the recycle no matter.

Someone is going to get a great deal in 4 batteries…

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Brian:

One option I have not seen mentioned in this thread are golf cart batteries. These are one of the most popular options for budget conscious energy storage applications. They strike a pretty good balance between cost, durability, etc. I believe they are typically 6 volt cells. You can combine them in series to up the voltage (e.g. 2 batteries for 12 volts, etc.).

When I was implementing my solar array a couple of years ago, I spent quite a bit of time studying batteries, charging, etc. As someone already mentioned, www.wholesalesolar.com carries a variety of batteries and also has many good articles on charging systems, battery maintenance, etc. This is where I ended up buying my solar panels and batteries.

Anyway, when I was on that project, I was surprised to learn that the batteries are actually the largest cost item in most alternative energy schemes, such as solar. In my case, the cost of the batteries exceeded the cost of the solar panels by some bit.

In the end, I decided to go with some Rolls batteries ( www.rollsbattery.com ). These batteries are kind of the “gold standard” when it comes to energy storage. Unfortunately, they have a price-tag to match. I decided to go with AGM batteries because I had a mobile application with the batteries inside my camper. So, I didn’t want to deal with the hydrogen venting (AGM’s can still vent to some degree, but not nearly as much as conventional lead acid). However, it is my understanding that the conventional lead acid batteries are somewhat more cost efficient.

On the subject of charging, you are correct that there are multiple stages to charging (bulk charge, etc.). The more expensive your battery bank, the more care you want to exercise in making sure that you get a charger which matches the desired charging profile of your batteries, because mis-charging is probably the 2nd most common problem which leads to shorter battery life. If you are using cheap batteries, I wouldn’t sweat it as much. But if you are using expensive batteries, I would study the manufacturers recommendations, and make sure that I got a charger which matched the desired profile. In my case, I used a programmable MPPT charge controller from Midnight Solar.

The most common source of battery failure is excessively depleting the batteries, and/or letting them sit around in an uncharged state. You generally do not want to discharge deep cycle batteries below 50% capacity. Many inverter/chargers have a programmable disconnect which will stop drawing on the batteries when they reach a certain level of charge. However, I was surprised to learn that in my application (which involved mostly DC loads), there was no simple “off the shelf” solution to prevent the batteries from being excessively discharged. I eventually found a battery monitor designed for marine applications which would track the level of charge in the batteries with great accuracy, which had outputs designed to trip a disconnect relay. I designed a disconnect system around that. It would reliably disconnect my batteries whenever the charge dropped below 50%. However, I also designed in an over-ride function so that, in a bonaafide “emergency” I could fully deplete the batteries if necessary.

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PS:

I should also mention that batteries are fairly temperature sensitive, and perform better at warmer temperatures (up to a point). In a low temperature environment, the capacity, etc. can drop by half or more (which explains why the car doesn’t want to start on those cold mornings). Therefore, if you have a choice, you want to keep your batteries relatively warm, which is why I elected to place them in the interior of my camper (and later in an insulated box which use “recycled heat” from the charge controller to maintain temperature). A good battery monitor / disconnect system will have a thermal probe attached to the batteries to monitor their temperature, since it is otherwise not possible to accurately track their state of charge. It may also be the case that this is necessary on the charge controller side as well. At the moment, I can’t recall whether my system has a thermal probe attached to the charge controller, but I will look the next time I am over there.

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Random somewhat related question: if one uses a volt-meter on one’s (properly wired) truck, what should the reading be from Pos terminal to a ground on the engine/frame?

I was really expecting to see 12.something volts, but it was generally showing 0.3 volts with an occasional spike to 3-4 volts, which just seems weird.

I guess that the truck’s grounding system is designed to be a more efficient conduit of power, but I still wonder why it would give spikes of 3+ volts.

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Hey Brian .

The first thing I would do is check the volt meter to see if it is correct :relaxed:

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Check battery voltage directly at the terminals, confirm a 12 volt reading. Make sure the probes are making good contact on the frame. Sand off a clean metal spot to do your probing.

If the frame were truly ungrounded, none of your electrical stuff would work.

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Hi Brian, Ideally pos. ter. to chassis ground should be the same as terminal to terminal at the batt., providing all connections are sound. A fully charged auto batt. should be about 13.2 v. running you should be charging 14.2-14.5 Al

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Hi All ,
I was given a link to another idea that’s doing the rounds might have a use for one or two of us trying to keep power bills down as low as possible , and for those that get nothing back on net metering from there solar systems .

Dave
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ericclifton/orison-rethink-the-power-of-energy?ref=launchboom-s-t-intl-d&utm_source=launchboom&utm_medium=ads&utm_campaign=launchboom-s-t-intl-d

To clarify by testing:
(Ignition off)
Pole to pole on the battery=12.82v
Pos terminal to battery grounding bolt on frame= (now showing) 12.85v
Pos terminal to engine block= wildly jumping between roughly 5.2-8.6 with spikes up and down to 0 or 12.32.

I’m guessing that I just underestimated the “surface corrosion” on my engine block…

(Ignition on, engine off)
Pole to pole=12.38
Pos terminal to grounding bolt= 12.31
Pos terminal to engine block= 3.2-6.6 with spikes to 0 or 12.34

(Ignition on, engine running at idle)
Pole to =14.69
Pos terminal to grounding bolt =14.73
Pos terminal to engine block=14.63 with occasional dips to 5.1

The ground is very important and often over looked. I went nuts trying to get an engine to run. The lights and everything seemed ok. It boiled down to that little braided step that goes from the engine to the fire wall. The motor mounts and linkages and the exhaust system should ground it ---- but not this time… Check the cables that hook to the battery and also to the starter / solenoid AND GROUND to the block. The main cables get salt build up under the rubber insulation on the cable and this will stop the current from going from the battery to anything Some salt build up in this area will allow enough current to go through to head lights and all other electronics, but on a cold morning when you starter want a real good pull, the salt will block it. TomC

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Ran across this video that looks like fun to play with.

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