#110 Reviving an old 100A 12v lead acid battery
Why do some South Africans have to scrape the bottom of the barrel reconditioning old batteries?
Opening themselves up to potential health concerns and pollution of the environment?
Maybe I can explain.
We’ve had load shedding for years now and with the recent shenanigans for almost half a decade it’s got exponentially worse with even the ultra wealthy feeling it a bit.
You’d think these clever a wealthy men would have come up with a solution by now… but it’s seems as if they have either found a way to get comfortable or they just don’t care… As long as they are making money from their diabolical cadres and corrupt hand shakers why should they care? After all they can run their water, washing machine, stove and medical equipment because they either don’t get loadshedding in their public servant mansions or they have installed million rand solar systems using taxpayers monies it’s a win-win “we fail upwards in life”.
All this while endorsing terrorist activities blatantly with no recourse or accountability using South Africa’s past to manipulate the current population into submission for the “election year” the audacity is unbelievable.. but yeah with the 30% pass rate these guys have dumbed us down and are extremely comfortable in the current climate they have designed. They really set an honourable bar to pass. I could go on but this is article is about a battery.
Seems bleak and it’s hard to ignore or be patriotic and loving towards your county and fellow citizens when there’s so much negative energy being pumped in by the guys we are supposed to trust in looking after us.. giving our data to, trusting their banks… No wonder there’s so much crime and hate.. these guys flourish in it like bacteria fueled by glucose eating a tooth. Even when the tooth is rotten the bacteria continuous to eat and will.. if not treated get into the bloodstream infecting the entire body. The bacteria doesn’t take into consideration that in future it will die along with the tooth it just consumes indiscriminately.
With that being said lets get into battery reconditioning.
Recently I got hold of an old 12v lead acid 100A battery. This battery was bought 20 years ago and stored in a corner for a rainy day.
The battery was never charged and never used.
Upon inspection the battery was at around a measly 1.95V.. this did not look good but luckily I have a DC MIG/MMA welder and decided to use the good old crude welding trick on this big boy.
I removed the MIG setup and installed the stick clamp to the + terminal and the ground to the – terminal. see the photo.
I set the welder volts to about 21V and the amps to around 25A. Make sure you are using a DC welder AC will NOT work.
Make sure you do this outside or in a well ventilated room. It’s VERY important.. battery acid is no joke to organic materials.
First I did 21v at 25A for 5 minutes then let the battery rest for a whole day to observe it.
Once I concluded it seemed like it was fine my formula was 21v at 25A for 5 minutes then a 10 minute cooldown in between.
I did this 6 times and measured the battery in between times.
Times:
cycle: 1 | 9.17 V |
cycle: 2 | 9.50 V |
cycle: 3 | 10.97 V |
cycle: 4 | 11.41 V |
cycle: 5 | 11.75 V |
cycle: 6 | 11.77 V |
Once this was done I let the battery rest for a day.
Now comes the patience part… The battery could hold a charge but ever so slightly would drain and it was supper thirsty.
So I setup a dumb charger at 5A and let the battery charge up for a few days checking intermittently.
Next I setup my recondition charger and let it do it’s thing for a week and what do you know the recondition charger reported great values.
However the battery was still thirsty so I switched back to the 5A dumb charger and let it run for another week..
Fast forward about 3 weeks of low current and recondition charging and the battery seems to be doing fine
Holding a rock solid 12.6V and running my LED lights.
So my conclusion is that it is possible to desulfate and recondition a 100A lead acid battery that has never been used. The initial welder zapping was only the start I needed at least 3 weeks after that to “recondition” the battery to a useable state and I still don’t know the long term potential issues.
It really was just a patience game and also don’t do anything like messing around with the acid weights.
I would still like to figure out how to balance acid and water plus all the battery chemistry stuff but for now this welder trick is good enough.
UPDATE:
About a week later the battery began acting up again seems the internal resistance is high and there is a constant draw bringing the battery voltage down.
Overall I can say that this was a temporary solution and at the moment I don’t have all the fancy battery tools or chemistry knowledge to experiment further.
Also though the battery has issues it can still be somewhat used for low voltage applications now. So I guess I’ll view this as a feature instead of a bug 🙂 cheers