Playing with Batteries

[Cody]

Just for the sake of making a new topic for all the people out there that look at this site, I think I will write something about my newest project. So we all know how my truck battery had a little...incident while driving up to Elk Lake for a camping adventure. It, of course, got knocked loose from it's mounting place, fell against the engine block, partly melted, and dripped it's nasty corrosive sulfuric acidyness all over everything. Naturally it doesn't seem to hold a charge very long anymore, even by my trucks standards. So, while out on a shopping adventure of sorts today, we stopped at Knecht's and bought myself some battery acid. Who knew! So I am going to try to fill my battery back up a bit even though I don't have a clue what I am doing really. Can't be that hard. Questions? Comments? Stupid unrelated posts? More importantly...requests for a page of all this battery madness?

[Brad]

Be careful with that sulfuric acid. You could end up with disintegrated pants, nasty burns and there is even a small chance of an explosion. Fun stuff.

Battery acid is supposed to be diluted with water (and generally you pour the acid into the water and not the other way around). Most of the time you don't need to pour any acid in at all to refill a battery just water. Do you have a multimeter? That way you can check to see how much voltage your batter is putting out after you finish randomly mixing the acid and water together.

Good luck!

[Cody]

I suppose saying I had no idea wasn't exactly true. The stuff I bought is a acid/water mix meant to refill batteries, not just acid. From what I have read, batteries naturally evaporate over time lowering the liquid level over time and increasing the acid in the mix. This, apparently, causes faster corrosion of the lead lining and is obviously overall bad for the battery. My problem isn't that the water is gone, but that the battery was tipped upside down and leaked the mix out water and acid. So instead of adding water and diluting it too much, I am adding the proper mixture of both to bring the battery back hopefully to where it was. I could be wrong. If so please tell me because i certainly don't want to kill my $50 battery. I only know what I have read on forums and stuff.

[zourtney]

Cool. This is a great topic for Randomland. I have never played much with batteries. Anything you can add to the RandomBank of Knowledge would be awesome. Keep us informed!

On a bit of a side note, that truck must have a short somewhere in the harness. I do not know how one would go about tracking that down, but if you ever do, that would also be a good writeup. A less elegant solution would be to wire in a hard disconnect switch. But then you wouldn't have to physically disconnect one of the terminals when you know it's going to sit for a few days.

[Brad]

So it's a pre-mixed water and acid? Sweet, that should work good then.

Are you going to do something about the battery mount so you don't dump the battery again? Or was that a one-time freak accident kinda thing?

[zourtney]

Yeah, you most definitely need to build a battery box for that thing. It's always been a problem in that truck. The Batteries Plus car batteries are surprisingly small. Yet another good writeup!

[Nick]

Aren't most batteries maintenance free anymore?  I thought you just had to add stuff to the deep cycle ones. Also, not to try and hamper your fun, but when car batteries sit at low voltage for too long things start to oxidize inside, thus lowering the batteries total capacity (regardless of acid content) I don't know if this applies to empty ones or not.

Good luck! And let us know how it goes.. I have a battery or two that could use fixing if it is, in fact, possible.

[zourtney]

I think you should write this up when you're finished, regardless of the outcome. Even if it's a total disaster and your battery acid melts a hole through the Earth's crust and you release the Russian oil drilling demons and they interbreed with Steve the Cat, making some hideous creature too disgusting to even mention, the internet should know of it.

[Cody]

Well...it wasn't quite that bad, but it didn't go great. Naturally I put a little too much in so it leaked out all over everything but that's not so bad. What is really bad is that there was acid coming out of the positive power terminal which is slightly melted from its incident. So basically I am thinking I need a new battery.

[zourtney]

(I shouldn't even need to ask, but...)

Did you take pictures?

[Cody]

But of course! Well, Kolby did I guess but there are pictures.

[zourtney]

You should drag him in here, too. We need more peeps.