Reviving a battery

Is there a trick to getting a totally dead battery to recharge? I hav
had it on a charger for quite a while, but it does not have any output
It has sat dead for possibly a few months, but even if the plates ar
sulfated, I think that it should accept at least a small amount o
electricity. It was not a very old battery when it was discharged. Wha
I believe happens is that an automatic charger that stops charging whe
a battery is charged does not sense a draw from a completely dea
battery, so it will not "turn on" and charge the battery. Will a smar
charger have the capability to charge it? Is there anything that can b
done to get the battery to charge?
It is a sealed battery. Any knowledge on this will be appreciated

 

Buy a new one. Simplest and easiest, if not the cheapest, solution.

 

This battery is no more! it has ceased to be! it's expired and gone to meet
it's maker! it's a stiff! it's kicked the
bucket, THIS IS AN EX-BATTERY!!
(Sorry,couldn't help myself)

 

I bought a very nice battery recommended by all friends on another
site. I left lights on bike and discharged the battery overnight. I
hooked it up to my smart/trickle charger, and it wouldn't charge. I
called the folks where I bought the battery, and they told me I had to
do something to 'fool' the charger into thinking it had a
non-discharged battery to work with:

Hook jumper-cables from the dead battery to another live battery (car,
bike, etc, so long as it's still 12v)

Then hook the charger to the dead battery.

Basically, you are hooking everything up in 'serial' connection
fashion.

The charger will 'see' a non-discharged battery via the connection, and
will go ahead and try to charge both batteries together as if they were
one battery. It worked! Charge my discharged battery back to life. If
it TOTALLY discharged, sulfated, and toast - this won't work. But, to
see if there is some life left, try this as last resort. Or take to a
shop that deals with batteries. (you guys that say 'buy new battery'
must have money to just burn on stuff?)

Make sense?

A dump, simple, ASCII picture, if I can

$$$ charger
XXX dead battery
OOO live battery
=== jumper cables, or cables from charger

$$$=== XXX === OOO

Else: the best GEL/AGM battery I found and love is from
http://www.batterymart.com/bigcrank_batteries.php
Purported to be "... the ONLY battery that is capable of delivering a
large number of deep cycles-up to 400 when fully discharged or up to
500 when discharged to 80%. Plus,the battery is specially designed for
high vibration applications" - if you believe their advertising. (No
commercial relationship with them, other than satisfied customer)

 

The battery has been laid to rest.
~
I thank you all for your help and understanding in what has been a ver
traumatic time for me.

 

Money to burn? Hmmm, a taxi to work & wages docked for poor time keeping
because the bike battery is dead would cost far more than the £20 a new
battery would cost.

You can get away with being late for work once in a while but if the
battery is goosed enough to need help fooling the charger then there's a
good chance it's going to leave me stranded again soon enough. Being
late twice the same week with the same excuse doesn't make you popular.

 

And then came McGuyver...

McGuyver could make stuff that sounds "Rube Goldberg" work, because he
*knew* how things work.

If you have two 12 volt car batteries available, hook them in series by
connecting the
positive terminal of one battery to the negative terminal of the other
battery.

This will give you 24 volts to shock the dead battery back to life. The
two car batteries in series simulate an expen$ive variable voltage
battery charger.

Then connect the remaining positive terminal of one car battery to the
positive terminal of the motorcycle battery and the remaining negative
terminal of the other car battery to the negative terminal of the
motorcycle battery.

So, you have the car batteries in series, but the motorcycle battery is
in parallel to the two car batteries.

It would be nice if you had an ammeter to put in series with the
positive lead of the
car battery going to the motorcycle battery.

But, if you don't, it's still OK. If you put a 1 amp fuse in series
with the positive lead, it should blow out within 5 minutes.

If the 1 amp fuse blows out, you know that the motorcycle battery will
charge up because more than 1 amp is flowing through the circuit.

Smart chargers often put out as much as 20 volts for a starting charge,
but, if your charger won't do that, the car batteries in series will
start a dead battery charging, if it is capable of taking a charge at
all.

Then you can put the battery on the so-called "smart charger".

 

If it were me, I'd probably buy a new battery. You could try a
stupid charger I suppose, (any source of 12V DC without any
microporcessors.). Non-sealed batteries can be revived
with EDT and a change of acid, but considering the costs
of a small battery such as this, I wouldn't bother.

I figure if I did succeed in revivng the battery and it took me a day
to do it I'd be paying myself slightly better than minimum wage
and I have better ways to spend my time.

 

FFS.

It's a battery. Batteries wear out. You can:

1. Try charging the thing.

2. Try re-charging the thing.

3. Try those magic pills and potions that are supposed to resuscitate
dead batteries.

4. Decide you'll live with it for the moment.

5. Discover, come the first sharp frost of winter, that (4) was a bad
idea.

6. Post endless messages to Usenet asking how to pull it back from the
grave.

7. Burn fuel and thus money in taking it to a shop "that deals in
batteries", and watch them tell you to buy a new one.

8. Burn more fuel and money taking it home again.

9. Buy distilled water and try adding that.

10. Repeat from (1) above.

Or.... you can buy a new battery, and rejoice in the fact that you've
avoided all the expense and hassle of 1 through 10 above, and sleep at
night, secure in the knowledge that it'll probably serve you well for
the next five years.[1]

[1] Or more - my 1997 Ducati is still on its OE battery.

 

Neil, he said it's a sealed battery.

--
Ivan Reid, Electronic & Computer Engineering, ___ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN
GSX600F, RG250WD "You Porsche. Me pass!" DoD #484 JKLO#003, 005
WP7# 3000 LC Unit #2368 (tinlc) UKMC#00009 BOTAFOT#16 UKRMMA#7 (Hon)
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".

 

Wot ? No Berryman's carb cleaner ?

Off-grid folks with thousands of bucks worth of lead-acid
battery banks do actually revive them with some stuff called
EDTA followed by new acid. (Not distilled water)

http://eduhosting.org/classes/windgens/fixbatts.html

For a $60 sealed (gel ?) battery, I'd agree it's silly to waste
a lot of time on it.

 

I'll a bit pedantic here. Actually, the connection is in parallel if all
voltages are equal, i.e. 12V. All positives connected together and all
negatives connected together. To me a "serial" connection implies series
as one would do to wire two 12V batteries to get 24V.

Each positive feeds the next positive and likewise for the negative
connections. Make the DC connections (there will probably an arc when the
good battery is connected to the discharged battery as they will try to
equalize) and then plug the charger in. If you use a good battery that is
still in a car, make the negative connection to the frame away from the
battery last to keep the arc as far away from either battery as possible.

- Nate >>

 

"The sulphating can effectively be removed or prevented by adding to
each cell a weak organic acid, ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid, known
to chemists as EDTA."

Oh, yes. it's right next to the Berryman's B-12 Chemtool Choke and
Carburetor Cleaner at Wal*Mart---NOT!

I tried some blue liquid once and the instructions were similar to what
your site describes, with replacement of the elctrolyte afterwards. It
didn't work, I had to buy a new Yuasa battery for $50.00, and that was
an expensive proposition back in those Carter recession days.

And I was still out of pocket for the EDTA and a gallon of electrolyte.

What the heck do you do with a whole gallon of electrolyte in a plastic
box inside a carbord box?

Say, have I mentioned that Berryman's B-12 Chemtool Choke and
Carburetor Cleaner
is a good aftershave lotion? ;-)

 

We used to run a 24 volt, 1400 AH (32 kwh) battery bank so this
probably
would have been just about right for that application. The question is
what
do you do with the many gallons of old acid.

While I never tried either EDTA or pulse charging, they've both been
around
for at least a decade or two and have maintained a following.

 

Dump it down the sewer? We had a 10,000 gallon tank of 98% pure H2SO4
at work
which we used to regenerate the cationic material in our boiler feed
water demineralizer. 50% sodium hydroxide was used to regen the anionic
material.

It had to be pumped into a 50 gallon drum and then to the demins. A
moronic operator started the pump one night and walked away to do
something else.

Then he went home and the operator on the next shift noticed an oily
liquid flowing into the sewer. So far as I know, the moron was never
disciplined for this error because he was a member of the ruling racial
clicque at the plant.

BTW, have I mentioned that Berryman's B-12 Chemtool Choke and
Carburetor Cleaner will kill your dog's fleas? He won't be too happy
about it though. ;-)

 

If you're out in the middle of nowhere making your own electricity
because you're past the end of the power lines, it might be a longish
trip to the nearest sewer don't you think ?

 

Don't people who live "off the grid" just dump everything in the
nearest vacant lot?

I used Berryman's B-12 Chemtool Choke and Carburetor Cleaner instead of
ether when I neutered my tomcat. He has never been the same since and
he doesn't trust me anymore. ;-)

 

I make my living as a system admin who is responsible for a number of
UPS's along with many other systems, and every battery rejuvenation
scheme I ever heard of (and I've heard of a lot) were all based on junk
science. It's like the 100 mile per gallon carburetor. If the people
who use a lot of batteries spent a quarter of the effort finding the best
price for replacement batteries and building relationships with their
battery suppliers in order to get those prices, as they do searching for
a magic elixer to wake up their old tired batteries, they would be
a lot further ahead of the game and spend a lot less money on them.

People don't seem to understand that just about all batteries are made
by a small handful of giant corporations out there, and that at least
half or more of the money they pay for a battery is going to the middleman,
and to the freight carriers. There's a huge amount of room to negotiate,
and there's wide differences in suppliers prices.

Most suppliers like dealerships and such will carry batteries as a sideline
and only sell a handful of batteries at a time. The dealership gets the
battery from a distributor, which gets it from a battery manufacturer
who is actually ordering large quantities of the batteries from the company
who really makes it, like Exide or Johnson Controls or Union Carbide
or some such. But, there's battery dealers who only deal with batteries
who are buying in such large volumes that they can qualify for the larger
discounts, and they pass them along to their regular customers.

Lead acid batteries like to be kept at full charge, and only discharged
about a quarter of capacity, and they do not like to be kept waiting
around in a discharged state, they want to be recharged as soon as
possible. They don't like temperature extremes, and they don't like
being overcharged, or fast charged. It's not rocket science.

Ted

 

Once again, the voice of reason and common sense. Nice one.

 

Well, there you go again, Ted, coming in from left field as usual.

I buy ONE battery for each motorcyle about every five years, and you're
telling me
that I'm supposed to stick my nose up some part$ counter idiot's ass,
in order to get a price break on that ONE battery?

Ridiculous. Last time I needed a battery, I drove over to Sears and
they tried to overcharge me for a Die Hard, so I drove over to
Chaparral and they sold me the same battery for half price.