Help! I've reggubed me battys

[stevesales]

Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Went away leaving the solar panels connected to my house batteries (a nearly new bank of 6V Trojans) via an intelligent charger.
This turned out to have the IQ of a lump of BluTak and just kept giving them God's Good Volts so I came back to twelve totally dry batteries.
I poured in gallons of Aqua Distillata and they recovered voltage but have no significant capacity.
I didn't have an hydrometer on the boat and the swindlers have stopped selling them (presumably because someone in the States tried to use a full one as a telescope) - I must steal the label on the pushchair that says 'remove infant before folding'- so I don't know what the SG is.
OK so I'm a twerp, but I'm a batteryless (or penniless) twerp.
Anybody got any ideas ? Snake Oil ?

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

I really feel for you...there but for the grace of God, etc. I also have very large solar panels and an 'intelligent' controller that I keeping my eye on like a hawk (it buzzes like a 1960s car voltage regulator, not the 'microprocessor controlled advanced controller' it is supposed to be) and it doesn't seem to be doing all that it says on the box. Thankfully I live aboard and have a BEP battery condition meter so can keep watching.

Now, back to your specific problem. Trojan batteries are some of the best you can buy and you have wisely gone for flooded lead acid, so all may not be lost. You did the right thing by adding water and recharging but if this isn't working you might need to add acid. H2SO4 is hard to obtain and in any case you wouldn't know what strength to add, or how much. Some or all of the present electrolyte might need to be poured out and fresh acid put in, at the correct strength. Is it practicable for you to get the batteries back to a Trojan dealer, who could do this for you? If you don't want to miss sailing during this period, you could put a cheap car battery in for the time being, and strap it down with a bit of webbing.

Buying an hydrometer isn't going to solve the problem - what action would you take in the case of a high or low reading?

 

[stevesales]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Thanks for the sympathy and advice.
I have bought a second hand car batty to keep me going while I weep, curse and kick the cat.
I will contact trojan as you suggest. If I get any sense out of Trojan I'll post it for and other poor sdos with the same KateStrophe.
The hydrometer might tell me how much acid I need to add... or not.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

[ QUOTE ]
The hydrometer might tell me how much acid I need to add... or not.

[/ QUOTE ]The hyrometer will tell you the specific gravity of the electrolyte (be sure to correct for temperature, especially in a warm climate). It will not tell you how much acid of a given strength to add, unless you are armed with the manufacturer's tables of volumes and strengths. Emptying out the old acid and refilling would not practicable in a boat or marina environment - sulphuric is evil stuff and burns wood and fabric as well as your skin (and eyes). Having handled strong acids and alkalies in a plating shop during my engineering training, I wouldn't dream of changing battery acid 'at home'. Trojans are well made and I am 90% confident that a dealer could salvage them provided he has the expertise. What you don't need is a 'retailer', you need a main dealer who is familiar with and equipped to fill and service lead acids. Good luck! Do please let us know how you get on, good or bad.

 

[stevesales]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Thanks again, I'll certainly keep you posted.
There's quite a bit on the Internet on using EDTA to remove sulphating - firstly has anyone tried this (Google on EDTA lead acid for info)
secondly what is the likely reason for the poor things refusing to take charge ?
I have contacted Trojan, more when I know more.

 

[BobOwen]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

There is a small battery charger known as the 'Optimate'. Very popular in the motorbike world. They are slow chargers and can bring pretty duff batteries back to life.

There was a report on them in a bike mag a few years ago. The author found an old battery that had been removed as dead, a year previously and left hanging about. After 3 attempts over a few days, it brought the battery back to useable life.

I have one and have had good results with it, even with large car batteries, especially when used with fresh acid. I believe it starts its cycle by producing higher voltage spikes, which help overcome sulphation. They are 12V but you could do 2 batteries at once. Might be a viable last resort chance!

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Yes, the idea of pushing very high current, short time, pulses into 'dead' batteries is quite an old one and has been claimed to work well on lead acids and NiCds. The sort of people who say it works are quite critical so I wouldn't discount it however it is rather like herbal medicine - no doubt it does work at times but there isn't enough proper research to know why, how, or when it works. If I had nearly-new Trojans, which are very expensive, I would wait for either Trojan or a good battery service company to have a go first, using conventional methods (replace the electrolyte). If that fails, then why not?

For the same reason, I wouldn't use EDTA or other chemicals at this stage. In any case, some chemicals might disturb the electrolyte and result in excessive gassing.

 

[jimboaw]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

I hate to say this but not only are your batts cooked, I think your goose is as well. 12 x 6V Trojans adds up to about 1300 amp/hrs I rekon so what solar panel output did it take to do the cooking?

 

[Ships_Cat]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

What are your solar panels rated at for output?

I agree with Jim, if you have 12 x 6 v Trojans, unless you are talking about uncommonly small ones (T105's an T605's are about the smallest deep cycle batteries Trojan normally produce, 12 of which total well over 1000 AHrs, although they make slightly smaller 6v cranking batteries), then I suspect that either you have an unusually big solar panel farm, or the problem is elsewhere.

We use Trojan batteries on our own boat - the current set are coming up to 9 years old now and do not seem to be significantly different in capacity to when new. They have always had a comparatively high Peukert coefficient though (relatively high voltage drop whilst under load).

John

 

[stevesales]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Battys inherited from previous owner who always went OTT on specs. He had just changed them.
There are indeed 12 of them, one bank of 4 and one of 8.
Solar panels are 200W , batteries are T105s
They had three months of Caribbean sunshine - do the sums - even a modest 3 amps at 10 hours per day 30AH/day x 90 = 2700 AH if the reg didn't drop the volts to trickle charge I reckon that would have been enough to gas them dry.
I think they are reggubed as well although our big tractor batteries are always delivered 'dry charged' with acid to be added. However that is achieved in a controlled way rather than concentrating the acid and reducing available plate area by electrolysing off the water.
I was intending to work from the boat - lots of computer time - one reason why I bought this particular boat was the large reserve capacity but now will have to consider replacing the whole damned lot.

 

[Ships_Cat]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Yes, quite likely then if left with no load on the batteries for that length of time.

Regarding the batteries I would not know what the extent of the damage would be, but would expect that there will likely be some damage to the plates through exposure to air. The best check would be a Trojan (or other good battery) dealer refitting them with electrolyte and recharging them. I would suspect that a standard recharge would be then all that could be done as the batteries would not be sulfated, any damage will be to the plate paste deteriorating.

Then maybe consider doing as we have done (even though with a smaller ratio of solar panels to battery capacity), the panels are switched thus - Regulator (ie charge to batteries is through the regulator), Bypass Regulator (ie direct to batteries from panels, so regulator failure will not cripple the charging), and Off (ie panels isolated from both regulator and battery).

As battery life is significantly improved if they are maintained at full charge it is very beneficial to have a maintenance charge from the panels when the boat is unattended. Maybe if your panel sizes allow, put some capacity unlikely to damage the batteries in case of regulator failure onto its own regulator.

John

 

[stevesales]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

I'm afraid you're right.
Just the thought of extracting the lot and dinkying them to a dealer fills me with lethargitis.
Anyway if this post stops anyone else doing the same it has done some good..... but not to muggins

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

[ QUOTE ]
Anyway if this post stops anyone else doing the same it has done some good..... but not to muggins

[/ QUOTE ]You haven't done anything 'wrong'. You are supposed to be able to leave it all on - that is the whole point of having a regulator. Failure of the solar regulator should be no more likely than the failure of a mains charger - most of us leave those on 24/7 on marina berths. Maybe you have a claim against the regulator manufacturer? I'm not a legal person but maybe this is a consequential damages claim? Maybe the regulator supplier would listen with sympathy to such an argument...who made the regulator, and which model?

 

[Ships_Cat]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Perhaps just taking one battery out and seeing how it goes when refitted with electrolyte and being recharged may give an indication as to whether it is worth doing the same with all or not.

As Lemain says one should be able to rely on the regulator and we have always done that. However, while we have less solar capacity versus battery capacity than you (we have around .12W/Ahr storage compared to your around 0.15 - 0.16) we split the solar capacity in two each with its own regulator. That from the point of view of providing redundancy, and also so that a regulator failure to uncontrolled voltage meant less risk to the batteries, and so that a lower maintenance charge is possible if the boat is unattended for any length of time when there is high solar radiation.

John

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

I've just had a thought. My solar regulator has two outputs. One is labelled 'load' and the other is labelled 'battery'. The latter is pretty obvious but 'load' is intended to drive a piece of local equipment such as a water pump, or whatever. I'm not sure exactly how it is supposed to work because it is not of any interest to me but I suspect that if one were to connect the battery across 'load' it would get an unregulated feed from the solar panels.

 

[Ships_Cat]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Normally, across the "Load" terminals you will get the battery voltage, whatever that may be. But when the battery voltage falls below a preset discharge point then the load terminals are isolated from both the batteries and the solar panel ie the load is dropped. This enables one to power a discardable load.

On some regulators (maybe most) the load is not dropped unless the battery voltage is below the preset for more than a period of time eg 25 seconds or whatever, to avoid the load being dropped just because some high start current load off the batteries has come on line temporarily dropping the voltage.

John

 

[stevesales]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Good idea re tipping out one pair of battys and bunging in some new H2SO4 (thanks for the cautions, Lemain - what I do when not sailing is this so don't worry about a bit of acid)
Don't know what make the regulator is or how it is wired, most of the boat wiring makes an IRA bomb look childish.

 

[stevesales]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

This from Trojan
You have several options, ranging from simple to complicated.

1. The first thing is to add back distilled water, which you've already done.
2. Equalize the batteries for at least 4 to 6 hours. This mean overcharging them at 15.5 volt and let them gas and bubble freely. This helps stirs up the electrolyte.
3. Once equalization is done, check the specific gravity of all cells. If they are around 1.270 to 1.277 then you're good to go. At the minimum, you should be reading about 1.260 specific gravity. Anything less and you might need to equalize some more or...
4. Replace the electrolyte. This is complicated and has to be done just right. I wouldn't attempt it unless you know what you are doing and have a mean to properly store and dispose of the used electrolyte.

Bottom line: You might be able to bring the batteries back but because the plates were exposed to air which attacks them, battery life has been affected.

 

[Ships_Cat]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Interesting feedback - I would value hearing how you get on.

Good luck.

John

 

[stevesales]

Re: Help! I\'ve reggubed me battys

Thanks, it will be July before I get to the things but will post a follow up if anything useful happens (which I somehow doubt.......)