Ping - Larry The Cable Guy, or should I say Larry The Charger Guy.

Larry, In past posts you've mentioned that most batteries don't die of
old age, that they're usually mistreated in one way or another and
killed prematurely.
I've listened to that advice, have been careful with my batteries, and
they've treated me pretty good. Well, last weekend when I got to the
boat I noticed I forgot to open the main battery disconnect when I left
the previous weekend, and the battery that supplies the stereo system
was DEAD! I wasn't surprised, but I knew what it probably meant, and
sure enough it won't take a charge now. I haven't tried an old
fashioned charger yet, but I did try my Schumacher 12 Amp Ship to Shore
Supreme Fully Automatic.
http://www.batterychargers.com/detai...%2DPE&catid=21

It's not the end of the world, it's only 1 deep cycle battery, but it
was only 14 months old, so in that respect it kinda hurts.

Anything I can do to get _some_ life back into it?

Question #2) Not relating to previous question, this is just a general
charging question for decent batteries. You've also mentioned in past
posts that it's better to charge a battery slowly. What I usually do is
leave one battery on the charger at the dock when I leave for the
weekend. The Schumacher Fully Automatic allows me to do this and not
worry about it even if I don't come back for two weeks. But even if I
do come back the following weekend it's still been on the charger for 4
or 5 days minimum. I don't use my batteries in banks, I use them singly
in different areas of the boat, so is there a smaller(amperage) charger
that is fully automatic that would work better for me in that
application? Being that the battery will always have at least 4 days to
charge I'm thinking it might be better to use one that is less than 12
amp capable. What do you think?

(Floating Mind) wrote in news:8736-44ECA717-16
@storefull-3114.bay.webtv.net:

Ping - Larry The Cable Guy, or should I say Larry The Charger Guy.


It's not the end of the world, it's only 1 deep cycle battery, but it
was only 14 months old, so in that respect it kinda hurts.

Anything I can do to get _some_ life back into it?

It's not the battery. It's the charger.....Huh??

Open the stubborn "maintenance free" caps by prying them out and look in
the cells to see if they're dry. Don't fill them. Add DISTILLED WATER
ONLY until it just submerges the plate tops, a little at a time. Any
cell the plates are still submerged, leave it alone until we're done. We
can't charge battery plates that aren't submerged.

Fancy battery chargers look at how you have them connected before they'll
turn on, to make sure you have the terminals hooked the right way, not
shorted, etc. So, when they see a really DEAD battery like yours hooked
up to them, they say, "Aha! The stupid has the terminals shorted
together! There's no voltage, here, like a battery." They stubbornly
refuse to start.....

Go find a simple old automatic battery charger, or one not so automatic
at all. Charge the battery for a few hours with the simple battery
charger until it has some voltage, then charge the battery with the
"wonder charger", which will now sense the battery has "some voltage" and
will complete the charge.

Note to self - Keep old battery chargers around just in case this happens
again......


Question #2) Not relating to previous question, this is just a general
charging question for decent batteries. You've also mentioned in past
posts that it's better to charge a battery slowly. What I usually do
is
leave one battery on the charger at the dock when I leave for the
weekend. The Schumacher Fully Automatic allows me to do this and not
worry about it even if I don't come back for two weeks. But even if I
do come back the following weekend it's still been on the charger for 4
or 5 days minimum. I don't use my batteries in banks, I use them
singly
in different areas of the boat, so is there a smaller(amperage) charger
that is fully automatic that would work better for me in that
application? Being that the battery will always have at least 4 days
to
charge I'm thinking it might be better to use one that is less than 12
amp capable. What do you think?


Yes. It's at your high-class marine store...the auto department of
WalMart. The charger is an octagon, black plastic brick...all sealed up
with two LEDs on the side where the label is. The model is Schumaker SE-
1-12S "1.5A Fully Automatic Onboard Battery Charger/Maintainer". It has
a 6" long power cord on one end and red and black battery leads coming
out the other. There are no switches...It's automatic, you know. Last
price I remember was around $20. Buy one for every bank of batteries on
the boat. I took mine out of my boat before I sold it. It's an
invaluable asset. It has also been mounted in its bracket on 2 jetskis
and two power boats over the years...(c; It's SEALED in epoxy, which
accounts for its survival. The model number may have changed some but
the new ones still look quite the same.

The green LED means it's plugged into AC power. The red LED means the
battery is all charged up and I've COMPLETELY SHUT OFF until the battery
voltage drops a whole volt, at which time I'm gonna zap it again. The
red LED is also an EXCELLENT charge indicator for even the simplest
outboard motor. Even unpowered, the red LED will be lit for hours after
the boat's engine charger has been shut down. If it doesn't light, it
hasn't been properly charged to 14.2VDC. No AC power is necessary to get
it to light up...just voltage. Leave the charger permanently connected
by its ring terminals straight to the battery terminals. It comes with a
2 piece mounting bracket to mount to the bulkhead beside the battery.

Autozone or similar auto parts houses also have them in their battery
departments. It will never boil a car or boat battery overcharging. I
also use it at home to charge even the smallest 12V gelcells in my shop!
When you hook it to a small gelcell, the red light comes on from the 1.5A
overcharge current in a matter of minutes, goes back out, and starts
cycling...er, ah...like those fancy pulse chargers?..(c; When it no
longer pulses and stays red, the little gelcell is charged.

Even on a little jetski battery, I ran it continuously for weeks without
electrolyte loss.


--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.

Larry wrote:
Open the stubborn "maintenance free" caps by prying them out and look in
the cells to see if they're dry. Don't fill them. Add DISTILLED WATER
ONLY until it just submerges the plate tops, a little at a time. Any
cell the plates are still submerged, leave it alone until we're done. We
can't charge battery plates that aren't submerged.

Isn't any portion of a plate which has dried out, permanently damaged
and unchargeable? The rest of the "dead" battery may be rechargeable,
but the battery's capacity is reduced.

"Mark" wrote in news:1156734601.788399.316510@
75g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:

Isn't any portion of a plate which has dried out, permanently damaged
and unchargeable? The rest of the "dead" battery may be rechargeable,
but the battery's capacity is reduced.




Nope. It just lost contact with the electrolyte, so is unable to be in the
current stream to recharge. As electrolyte is recovered in charging, it
gets deeper, so we don't want to fill a discharged battery because it will
overflow by the time charging has recovered it.

--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.

Larry wrote:
"Mark" wrote in news:1156734601.788399.316510@
75g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:

Isn't any portion of a plate which has dried out, permanently damaged
and unchargeable? The rest of the "dead" battery may be rechargeable,
but the battery's capacity is reduced.

Nope. It just lost contact with the electrolyte, so is unable to be in the
current stream to recharge. As electrolyte is recovered in charging, it
gets deeper, so we don't want to fill a discharged battery because it will
overflow by the time charging has recovered it.

I understand that a discharged battery shouldn't be topped of with
water for that reason, but it's my understanding that once a plate is
exposed to air and dries, it is irreversibly sulfated and will not
contribute to the battery's capacity again.

From a University of Washington paper:

"If plates are exposed above the electrolyte then the capacity of the
exposed plate
areas has been lost and cells will likely develop short-circuits
because of plate shedding. Batteries with exposed plates should be
replaced."

You seem to be saying exposed plate area can be recovered by
recharging. That's apparently not so. I once accidently exposed about
50% of the plate area on a battery, and it lost about 50% of its
capacity; soon thereafter it died due to shorted plates, probably from
plate shedding. Exactly as the UW paper described.

"Mark" wrote in news:1156829173.178462.265980
@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:

From a University of Washington paper:

"If plates are exposed above the electrolyte then the capacity of the
exposed plate
areas has been lost and cells will likely develop short-circuits
because of plate shedding. Batteries with exposed plates should be
replaced."

You seem to be saying exposed plate area can be recovered by
recharging. That's apparently not so. I once accidently exposed about
50% of the plate area on a battery, and it lost about 50% of its
capacity; soon thereafter it died due to shorted plates, probably from
plate shedding. Exactly as the UW paper described.



In order to "sulphate", conversion of lead metal into lead sulphate, it
takes sulphuric acid, not air. Lead sulphate is suspended in the
solution of the electrolyte, after it has released its electrons to us.
I don't see how exposing lead to air can eat it away. That's what the
posts are doing all the time, and they're lead.

No, I disagree with the professors, I'm afraid. Using a battery with low
electrolyte eats away the BOTTOM of the plates, sometimes bad enough to
eat holes in them we cannot recover because the electrolyte still has the
same acid it started out with, in a more concentrated form, and the
electronics freed must come from the plates still submerged, eating them
away far worse than the engineers intended. So, if anything is
"damaged" or "unrecoverable" it MIGHT be the submerged portion of the
plates, not the exposed-to-air top, which won't get eaten away
discharging at all. See my point?

It's the submerged part that needs to be recharged very badly, not the
exposed part. But, alas, we're talking of extreme conditions, not the
conditions in your boat. You don't discharge the battery severely, or I
hope you don't. You also didn't let the battery get THAT FAR down in
electrolyte, just a little below the plates, exposing them. When you
submerge these plates, that haven't been holed permanently, with
DISTILLED WATER ONLY, please....The battery will nicely recover, after a
few charge/discharge cycles, to its soft plated old self, the tops of the
plates resoftening by the cycling, like we're SUPPOSED to do to a brand
new battery that's just had its initial electrolyte charge poured into
it. Of course, noone in reality ever does a proper cycling of a new
battery to soften up those plates. That takes too much time from our
busy life. The dealer doesn't do it, either. He pours the electrolyte
pack into the holes, helter skelter, and never checks the gravity again
to see which cells are really hot and which are not-so-hot...caused by
differences and impurities in the plates.

If we had any brains, we'd dump this crap and go back to "Edison Cells",
those Nickel-Iron-Potassium Hydroxide beasts just outside my hamshack.
Mine were made in the late 40's for a telephone system and STILL have the
capacity stamped into the cases....(c; Ni-Fe batteries are only bad for
the battery business....never needing constant replacing and recycling as
Pb's do....the reason they just HAD to be eliminated.
http://www.beutilityfree.com/battery...tery_flyer.pdf
Don't worry about how deep you discharge them. Recharge them when the
lights get too dim...(c; It doesn't hurt them at all. You don't even
need a regulated charger.

--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.

Larry wrote:
. . . Schumaker SE-1-12S "1.5A Fully Automatic Onboard Battery Charger/Maintainer".

I'm wondering, would one of these things fully charge a discharged
*big* bank of lead acid batteries, like 500AH capacity? It'd take 20
days or so, but could it do it without harm? Would the gentle charge
rate stop sulphation during the 20 day charge? A half dead lead acid
battery sittin' around for 20 days would sulfate up with *no* charging
going on. And could 1.5 amps drive the batteries up to 14.2 volts?

Never tried such a thing - tiny charger, big batteries.

"Mark" wrote in news:1156735487.090872.131750@
74g2000cwt.googlegroups.com:

I'm wondering, would one of these things fully charge a discharged
*big* bank of lead acid batteries, like 500AH capacity? It'd take 20
days or so, but could it do it without harm? Would the gentle charge
rate stop sulphation during the 20 day charge? A half dead lead acid
battery sittin' around for 20 days would sulfate up with *no* charging
going on. And could 1.5 amps drive the batteries up to 14.2 volts?

Never tried such a thing - tiny charger, big batteries.


No harm at all. This charger completely shuts off when the red led comes
on at 14.2V and doesn't come back on again until the cell voltage drops
to around 13.2V. The charge you get is very deep, penetrating the plates
very nicely.

Nothing stops sulphation, a natural occurance no matter what you do. To
greatly reduce sulphation, the cure is to never discharge the battery
below 50% of capacity. The bigger the battery's capacity, the less
you'll be discharging it, so it sulphates (or sulfates??) less. It will
only sulfate when when the lead sulfate in suspension gets saturated
enough the ions form crystals that gravity falls out into the bottom.
You leave your car battery "half dead" all the time...short trips, moving
the car, the fans running long after you've shut down the engine drawing
30A cooling the radiator, the headlight delay shutdown drawing 20A so you
can get inside for many minutes. The recharging, even at the slow rate,
will cause the ions in suspension to stay in suspension.

If this little charger had no automatic shutdown, I'd never suggest
leaving it charging 500AH batteries as it would overcharge them,
eventually...after that 20 days.

One of the benefits of very slow charging is it never heats the
electrolyte. The batteries, here in the South, are kept too hot in the
first place inside an engine room at 120F with the boat sitting in the
sun. Slow charging keeps from exascerbating the problem.

You must also consider any discharging loads like bilge pumps that cycle
on and off when you're not in the boat, before you consider if this
little battery charger is a good idea. If you're charging at an average
current of 1.5A and the loads are averaging 2A, that isn't going to work
and you'll arrive at the boat with dead batteries, ruined. The poster
that started this, I assumed, has a boat on a trailer with everything
shut down. If you forget one good light, the charger will not recharge
and may even lose the battle, killing the batteries....not good.

--
There's amazing intelligence in the Universe.
You can tell because none of them ever called Earth.

Larry wrote:
"Mark" wrote in news:1156735487.090872.131750@
74g2000cwt.googlegroups.com:

I'm wondering, would one of these things fully charge a discharged
*big* bank of lead acid batteries, like 500AH capacity?

No harm at all. This charger completely shuts off when the red led comes
on at 14.2V and doesn't come back on again until the cell voltage drops
to around 13.2V. The charge you get is very deep, penetrating the plates
very nicely.

I don't understand. To drive a fully charged 500AH battery bank to
14.2 volts requires a charge current of 1% to 2% of the bank's
capacity, 5 to 10 amps. I suspect the little 1.5 amp charger would
never drive the bank up to 14.2 volts.

It [the battery] will only sulfate when when the lead sulfate in suspension gets saturated enough [that] the ions form crystals that gravity falls out into the bottom.

Sulfation which drops to the bottom of the battery case does not
decrease battery capacity. There's space at the bottom of the battery
for just that reason. The battery's service life is decreased;
ultimately enough crud will drop to the bottom of the battery to short
it out.

Large lead sulfate crystals *which are imbedded in the plates* do
decrease capacity; they act like insulators and remove that portion of
the plate from service. It's sulfated plates, not lead sulfate sittin'
in the bottom of the battery, which reduce capacity.

But that's not my question, which is, would slowly charging an 80%
discharged battery for 20 days (which means the battery would be 40%
or more discharged for 10 days) result in sulfation problems?

If you're charging at an average
current of 1.5A and the loads are averaging 2A, that isn't going to work
and you'll arrive at the boat with dead batteries, ruined.

Agree with that.

But I'm not certain that a 1.5 amp charger will fully charge a 500AH
bank.

Have you actually done that? 1.5 amp charger charging a 500AH bank or
larger.

I'm guessing a 500AH bank would need at least a 5 amp charger to bring
it up to 14.2 volts and a fully charged state. A 1.5 amp charger might
bring it up to something like 80% charged before it can't up the
voltage above 13.2 volts or so, and just floats the partially charged
bank. Could be wrong though, anybody wanna chime in here with
firsthand experience?

I do agree a 1.5 amp charger will float a fully charged 500AH bank,
that's 36 amps a day, more than the natural discharge loss of the bank.
But will it charge it up from a deeply discharged state?

I'd like to hear an advice on the following related question.
My summer was plagued by continuous low charged batteries due to the
fact that I was most of the time sailing (literally: wind-sailing).
Every time I would turn on the engine the alternator would provide only
20A and, with a 400Ah bank, that would mean ages of noise and vibration.
The alternator itself is a good Motorola NGM 14V 75A and the engine is a
even better Perkins 4.108. Both would be able to deliver much more than
the scanty 20A.
Notice that the Motorola has the regulator enclosed and I do not know if
a "smart" regulator would fit. I understand that there should be a way
to cheat the regulator and force a higher charge for at least some
reasonable time. Anybody knows how?
Notice that the noise and vibration would surely prevent me from
forgetting the "cheat" switch and overcharge.
Thanx

Daniel