Calcium in your battery?

nigelmercier said:
See here
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No that's not relevant, sorry.
The battery the OP is looking at is flooded not AGM/VRLA. It's "sealed maintenance free" i.e. you can't top it up unless you can rip off a top cover and find a way in. Giveaway is that it has a magic eye (hydrometer) in it.
 
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whiteoaks7 said:
What's good about have calcium in a lead-acid battery? What benefit does it confer?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Xplorer-Sea...D2/ref=sr_1_26?ie=UTF8&qid=1350400585&sr=8-26

Looking at the re-charge cycles I would deduce that adding calcium was a step backward - 300 recharges is just two seasons of cruising for me. So am I missing something?

David Berry
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Very briefly -

With a few exceptions you can't use pure lead for the framework in a lead acid battery, it's not stiff/strong enough. You have to alloy it with something.
The main alloying elements are antimony (traditional European practice) and calcium (favoured in US). They are both lead acid batteries and the chemical reactions in them are the same, the antimony or calcium plays no part in them.
Anything up to 10% antimony used to be used with bad effects on water loss. However any decent antimony battery now will have <2%, virtually removing the problems.
Lead calcium will still gas a bit less but lead antimony is used in maintenance free as well.
When I was in the industry it was always accepted that calcium was LESS resistant to high temperatures and LESS resistant to cycling than antimony. (We made both for different markets.) Advertising now seems to claim the reverse but I don't believe it.
The real reason that calcium is now preferred by most manufacturers, in Europe as well, is that antimony is very nasty and subject to ever increasing pollution controls. Calcium is easier to handle. You'll see fewer antimony ones in future I'm sure.
I've no idea who makes that particular battery or if it's any good. It's pretty cheap for its capacity.
On Alpha Batteries own website (they are just distributors not manufacturers but I think this is their own label range probably from Korea or somewhere) it's a bit cheaper and claims 450 cycles life! http://www.alpha-batteries.co.uk/leisure-batteries/225-ah-xplorer-leisure-battery/
When you're comparing batteries look at the weight. The heavier one for the same capacity is likely to last longer!
When I replace mine next year I shall stick to a known major brand, probably Varta or Exide or Lucas. That's for weekend use - if I lived aboard or cruised extensively I would probably get Trojan, not sure.
 
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In the '60's, Lucas, where I worked at the time, made batteries using "dispersion strengthened plates",
IIRC, the lead contained lead oxide to harden it.
 
Troubadour said:
No that's not relevant, sorry.
The battery the OP is looking at is flooded not AGM/VRLA. It's "sealed maintenance free" i.e. you can't top it up unless you can rip off a top cover and find a way in. Giveaway is that it has a magic eye (hydrometer) in it.
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My Leisure battery has a "magic eye " and screw filler plugs.
 
earlybird said:
In the '60's, Lucas, where I worked at the time, made batteries using "dispersion strengthened plates",
IIRC, the lead contained lead oxide to harden it.
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That's a new one on me. The paste the grids are filled with is made from milled lead oxide but I hadn't heard of it being incorporated in the cast lead grids. That's beyond my metallurgy to work out the effects.
 
nigelmercier said:
Not all of it I agree, but it explains why the Calcium is there.
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The only reference I can find to calcium in the Wikipedia article is this
"Because of calcium added to its plates to reduce water loss, a sealed battery recharges much more slowly than a flooded lead acid battery."
which is wrong on both counts.
Calcium is not added to reduce water loss. Pure lead construction loses less water than lead calcium.
The second half of the sentence is a complete non sequitur and false as well!

One of the references in the article is this paper http://www.battcon.com/PapersFinal2009/ClarkPaper2009FINAL_12.pdf which says much what I did in greater detail and agrees that antimony is much better than calcium for cycling duty.
 
VicS said:
US patent dated Mar 21 1967. http://www.google.co.uk/patents?hl=...q=dispersion strengthened lead plates&f=false

i have not read it I'll let you do that :)
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Thanks, had a glance. It seems it can only be used in punched out or expanded metal grids (like Expamet mesh), not cast, which I think will limit the plate thickness so I guess would only be appropriate for car size starter batteries.
There are some production batteries using expanded metal grids but as far as I know they use lead calcium or lead tin or pure lead. So I don't think this invention went anywhere.
I wonder if it would have affected the grid conductivity?
 
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