Another battery failure

[wpowokal]

Have noticed recently that battery volts have been dipping a bit lower than normal, so being a wet day I broke into the battery room.

Terminal voltage checks soon revealed one bank with high cell volts and of course one cell nealy zero.

The bulging positive plates can be seen to the left of the second pic, as these are 20 year old batteries one must expect these things. My guess is it shorted out and subsequently sulphated up.

allan down under

[Jon Miller]

Hello,

If you can get the top off, get a thin straw on an air compressor and blow a little air from the bottom of the plate in question to try and remove the sulphate and or any rubbish between the plates.  It might bring back a little life back to the cell.

Regards  

[tecker]

Epson salts in distilled water will take care of most of the sulphate . Wash that clean with tap water and fill it up with distilled water see put it on the charger at a trickle then pluse it if it comes up . If it's not shorted it will come up . If you can load it at all dump out half the water and ad acid and pulse more . Work in more acid and continue checking sg and add acid to get that up with a normal charge mode.

[Flux]

20 years is a good life for these type of cells. That one looks as though the electrolyte might have stratified. These cells need a good boiling regularly to stir up the electrolyte. If the others are the same it might not be a bad idea to give them a boil, but the damage may have been done long ago and not recently.

You know you are really on a looser with them when they start splitting the jars. The positives eventually expand and short to the negatives or split the jars.

You seem to have avoided certain batches that failed by corrosion of the positive link bars and connection failure to the positive lug. I have seen batches fail that way in far less than 20 years. Tungstone and Chloride both seem to have made some change at various times and certain batches have suffered, not sure if any other manufacturers had this problem.

Flux

[wpowokal]

If one looks at the second picture, to the left, two positive plates have definatly expanded and contacted the negative connetor.

They do get regular boilings, I feel that this one is just one that has fallen by the way, but I still expect to have enough survivors to last another 5 years.

allan down under