Reconditioning Batteries

[Barnacle Bob]

How do you recondition Lead Acid Batteries? Is it worth it? I've read about removing the electrolyte, filtering it, and then cutting off the top of the battery and cleaning the sulphate off the plates, checking for shorts or severed connections, etc. Then I came across a company called "Battery Doctors" that claims it can recondition a battery by just introducing a "reconditioning chemical" into the cells and charging the battery at a high rate and then a low rate, etc. Anybody have any experience with this... what is the reconditioning chemical?

[ion barnes]

Sounds like snake oil to me. My understanding is that you can not reverse the natural aging process of a lead acid battery. Once the plates are shot, its over.

[Figmental]

I have reconditioned a lead acid battery years ago by draining the acid and rinsing the lead suphate sludge out of the bottom,(fill with garden hose, shake and turn over many times).
This was over 35 years ago before my environmental awareness kicked in.
It worked and restored the battery"s charge capacity somewhat. It's my understanding that the sulphate breaks off of the plates during use and falls to the bottom where it builds up and finally shorts out the plates from the bottom.
To make a better battery put more space below the plates so the sulphete sludge takes longer to build up and make the short circuit.
Anyone else ever try that?
David

[Tom Galyen]

Gentlemen,

In my day to day work, which I must do to carry on my addiction to boats, I must deal with some very large and normal batteries. Let me give you some info on them.

Yes you can recondition batteries and some of the methods mentioned will work. HOWEVER, I do not reccomend you do any of it on your own! You are basicly messing with something that if you don't understand you can do much harm to yourself with or the enviroment around you. (And I say this without being an enviromentalist or even anything close, but just out of common sense.)Batteries are one of those things which we take for granted because they are all around us in our daily lives and we have dealings with them such as jump starting cars and boats etc. However always keep in mind they can excellent sources of Hydrogen gas and as such can be a surprisingly powerful bomb!

Besides there are companies and small shops in almost any small town or city that does it and you can buy reconditioned batteries from them for small change. Most will take your old battery in trade. That is where they get the ones they recondition and sell. Look in your phone book for one near you.

All batteries will run down after a while but it you take care of a new one and do proper maintenance on it, it should last so long that you will easily get your moneys' worth out of it and be able to afford a new one.

When we need new batteries at work we don't use reconditioned ones we go for new. Although the reconditioned ones will work OK for the price charged, they are not new and will not last as long. I don't care what the dealer says.

Sorry if this is too long but I wanted to get the info out.

Tom G. (Seaweed)

[Henning 4148]

There are different failure modes to lead acid batteries.

Whereas some special charging units claim to deal with certain cristal groth on the pates of long neglected batteries, I do not think they will work against shortening by sludge. If there is no sludge though, they might be worth a try.

Of course most of the sludge originally was on the plates, so with a battery that has sludge, the plates are thinner than they were, which, I would guess, equals to reduced capacity, even if the sludge is removed.

Another failure mode is mechanical breakage of plates or connectors / bus bars. In principle, it might be possible to weld such breakages but it sounds far from practical or sensible, especially on modern batteries where there is hardly any spare space so you would not be able to reach the area that is broken and it would be impossible to weld anything within manufacturing tolerances.

Also, although today you have insolation material between the plates to prevent them from touching each other or have little envelopes around the plates, in principle plates touching each other can also be a problem, especially if they connect when charged or on the charger (as mentioned above you may be in for an explosion).

Now, in the very old days, the battery casing was made from glass and it was either open at the top or the top could be removed. I have seen such beauties in a museum and it seemed to me that through the way they were designed it was very easy to repair any sort of failure on them. I guess some sort of repair work on them was common 100 years ago.

On modern plastic housed batteries, I would not consider it sensible. First you would have to get rid of the acid, always bearing in mind that one splash into an eye could cost you your eyesight, apart from burning fingers or skin, which could be very painfull as well. Then you would have to get rid of the sludge. Now, as lead is quite poisoness and makes people dumb, you do not want anything of this in your garden and you will probably not be allowed to dump it anywhere, so you will have to find a proper way of getting rid of the stuff. Opening and glueing together again a housing of a modern battery sounds far from sensible to me, there are far too many question regarding fitness of glue for the purpose and also of reassembling to the right tollerances. You simply wouldn't want to find out, that you got it wrong and that the new acid is all over the place or that something is touching something which it shouldn't be touching. Even if you just rinse the sludge out as suggested above, you are stuck with a battery that is past it's design life time, has lost a lot of lead from the plates, thus reducing capacity and also increasing the danger of mechanical breakage on the plates. Now if one of these plates then eventually breaks and short circuits the battery, you may be in for an explosion as mentioned above.