Renovate SLA batteries.

[Leslie]

I have these old 18 amp hour batteries that were used on an old brushed chain drive bike, and I used two of these on my new bike when it was attacked by some doche in town.

I found a hole in one and this battery was dicharging on a 50 watt lamp within 4 minutes.  So I patched the hole and decided to see if I could bring all of these batteries back up to speed.

Firstly I had no cash left to my name and with no rain in site, I needed a source of distilled water, you can buy this stuff for a song at the supermarket but to make thing a lttle interesting I decided to make my own.

1 kettle
1 kids building block to balance the pyrex pot
1 ceramic cup to catch the water
1 plastic measuring container to hold the block, cup and balance the pyrex pot.
1 syringe
1 plastic fork to turn the kettle on and off because it got to steamy and a little shocking
1 tea towel to seal the kettle to the pot
1 fan to cool the the pyrex pot..




Hehehe

This looks a little expensive but I only needed a lttle bit and it only took me about 15 minutes of switching the kettle on and off to get the optimum temperture for maxium water production, that pyrex pot gets a little hot and the water stops dripping so a fan to help cool it helped a lot...

Umm I estimated about 20 cents it cost me. a dime!



The more I made of this stuff the better it got.  I used an syringe we use for kids panadol.




You need to remove the tops off the the SLA batteries and underneath you will find the seals and absorbant matting.
Remove the seals and inside is where they use (soaking medium) gel or fibergalss matts to hold the water acid solution up against the plates.



Take a torch and look inside the cells and you will get and idea how much you need to add.  You don't want to fill the cells up to the top just up to the plates and the medium inside.  The acid will spew out of the top after a good charge if you over fill them.

When you fill each the cells you will see the the water reflect just above the soaking medium, this is just right.







When you put this back all together you will need to put all the sealer caps on glue the sealer plate on top as when you charge the batteries the caps will pop off and go missing.  Try not to leave the battery without the seal caps in place as you don't want any debris getting inside and fouling your acid solution.

It all went well I did a couple of discharges with the lamp and hooked a bushed motor up to get rid of some memory voltage and soon enough I was getting the bad battery to take a quick charge up to two hours.  Leaving these on float charge over night isnt going to hurt them..

Last time I checked them with the lamp as my cheapo multimeter is palying up, I could not tell the brightness difference between the good batts and the one that was discharging with in 4 mins,  Ill do a proper run on the brushed motor bike tomorrow and see if I get most if not all of the capacity back...

[Mel in HI]

Do you have someone in town that doesn't like you?  It seems you are always complaining about someone tampering with your bike.  Time for a bike alarm.

[Leslie]

UPDATE.


I was still a little scared to run the damaged battery in series with the other this morning so I isolated it to the 50 watt lamp and ran the other at 24 volts on the brushed DC motor for 15 minutes.  I saw no dimming of the bad battery.  So then I put them all in series and hooked them up the DC brushed motor.  1.5 hours latter they stlll powering this motor strong.  I think ill dpo another half an hour and charge them again.

Afetr I charge them I will add a little bit more distilled water to all of them as you will find some air gets chased out.

To me all batteries are going to give me some good mileage or ill use them on a solar panel led lighting system im designing before the get recycled.

Do you have someone in town that doesn't like you?  It seems you are always complaining about someone tampering with your bike.  Time for a bike alarm.

HUH!

Well it happened over 3 incidences. And two of them my wife was riding the bike and one involved my 12 yo daughter and coke all through the battery box on these little BMX chain drive bikes I have.  None of them were me riding it.

Sorry, yes! but I think someone doesnt like me! but they seem to pick on the girls so they are obviosly scared of of me and not my girls, Yes real douche bag.

Look im still repairing the damages from these incidences and I certainly am not going to let who ever this these people take me down.  I felt like giving up once.

I have a front rim to fix and it finished, I repaired everything, then I can move on.

If I can fix everything they damaged kudos to me.

[nitecheck]

317537  kudos for the reviving the SLA (I have a 3x 17AH SLA's sitting on my work bench as 2 were DOA from a dodgy ebay seller) - I think I will give your revive tip a go to see if I can get them running. Otherwise I really need to accept I was duped & drop them off to be recycled.

As for the lowlife/s that have damaged the kids bikes - it's very hard not take these things personally - but from my experience either it's some thoughtless prank or something a little more personal - from experience there never seems to be grey area here. The situation normally sorts it's self out or you need to take the time to sort out the individual/s concerned. But until this occurs you must not allow others actions to detrimentally affect you or your family. (my 2cents - or less than 2cents due to how the Oz $ is trading) 
 
 

[Leslie]

317537  kudos for the reviving the SLA (I have a 3x 17AH SLA's sitting on my work bench as 2 were DOA from a dodgy ebay seller) - I think I will give your revive tip a go to see if I can get them running. Otherwise I really need to accept I was duped & drop them off to be recycled.

Hold on. before you go adding water to those sla's, do you mean DOA as in 0 volts. If so, this maybe a good thing.  Make sure they have had some acid solution put inside them to begin with.  If the seller has given you batts that have not had any acid put inside them at all, then you require some good 35% sulfuric acid and 65% distilled water.  This is like getting a brand new battery never been sitting on the shelf for god knows how long. Slow charge them (read below).

Another thing I do sometimes is I slow down the charge rate.  I got one of these AC 240v timer and set it to charger over 12 hours, in that 12 hours it turns off 6 times, charge for 1 hour, settle for 1 hour, on, off, on, off, etc.... My batts uninterupted take about 5 hours max to charge.  I find this is really good to do for my SLA's as they balance better.  I missed doing a batt terminal up tight 2 days ago installing a new box, and it shook a little loose. One battery with the loose terminal seemed to be out of balance and I was losing speed and distance in one long ride,  it seems also the one that has the less capacity in the series does tend to be the one battery is left floating over the max specified charge voltage when charge has completed.  This problem tends to make charging shorter and the pauses increase charging time with less force on the any particular battery.  Sure things fix themselves up in a few rides with SLA's but this seems to fix things up faster and better.  I often use the timer when I put the bike to bed for more than 12 hours and set it to do another charge first thing in the morning for two hours, I avoid float as often as I can,  When things get out balance float charge seem to keep the voltage memory out of whack so the on off method is very very good and I seem to get very good milage, power, and speed from this.  Is it just me or does the SLA seem very saggy when its allowed to sit on a float for a long time?

[Leslie]

Important.

Make sure that all cells are either dry or wet or have had acid or not.  The differences turn your job from succes to mess.

You shouldn't add acid to a battery that just needs water and vice versa, and you should check if all cells are OK. Failure to add acid to one cell could make those 17ah monsters DOA.


Edit:
UMMMMM

To test SLA cell wetness and acidity?

Your guess is as good as mine, its not like you can float a hydrometer on a pad!  Maybe gets one of those long ear swabs and some litmus paper.

[Leslie]

Big trouble in little SLA land..

Nope! Slow charging that wasn’t enough as it seems. The slow charge balanced the batteries with in .03 of of a volt between the batts which is awesome by any standards. I took it out for a 35 km spin tonight and I got my first voltage cut off on the last hill around the corner from home.  I rode the batts hard tonight. 

I tested the voltages of the batts and one read below 10.35 which quickly jumped back up to 12.35 and volts and stayed there, while the others were sitting around 12.5 volts. I knew something was unbelievably wrong  .  I ripped the batt out of series and I could feel the heat adjacent the lose terminal I found 2 days ago.  I cracked her open and dipped the end of the plastic tie inside and dabbed it onto my tongue and could taste nothing, it was DRY!  Ohhhh noes!!! I dosed up all cells with distilled water (I bought this time) until I was sure all the pads were soaked plenty, with the volt meter connected, I got an rise in voltage from 12.35 up to 12.58 within 40 seconds of adding the water.

I put the caps back on and decided to keep sitting the batts upside down and side on for 10 minutes so the water would mix around and this was evidently the correct thing to do as the voltage rose to 12.66 volts just doing this.


3 hours latter.

I whacked her back into series in which the cell voltage had now jumped amazingly from 10.35 all the way up to 12.67 volts, I then took her out for a little spin a quick spin and wow with out a single second’s charge she was running at 28kph.   I hooked her up to the chargers and I can see that the battery is competing with the others evenly and she is rising nicely with the other batteries.


7 hours latter

I checked in on my bike!

Well it fast charged up to and floated at 14.05 volts which is pretty good for its first go after being watered.  No more out of balance charging from what I can tell and the bike had much more power than it did the two nights previously.  Just to be sure, tonight, I’ll water the other 2 batteries.

Stay tuned for more exciting shenanigans of the SLA battery.