Hurricane Electric BATTERY TIME

[dastardlydan]

Well it,s time to go to the bone yard to

find some good batterys.

Have access to a yard full of golf cart batterys.

all are 6 volt.

  Can someone please tell me what to look for,

have  voltage test meter and hydrometer,

not sure what to look for?

Thank for the help.

PS   will post new Genny picture when my carmera,

gets new batterys.

Moved to a more appropriate section.

[luckeydog]

to properly check the condition of a battery it needs to be fully charged

a load tester would be a good thing to bring with you.

other than that look for a date stamp on the battery. I am not talking about the sticker but the date stamp on the plastic case. although this my not help you if you don't have the date code. it has been a long time since i worked for Exide

so I don't remember what their code was. also Exide batteries suck. (my opinion from working for them for several years)

 also you should look into the battery and look for warped plates .... most batteries have some warp in them but what you want to avoid is extreme warping. bulging is bad the sides of the case should be straight.

also you can look under the cap and look for a black soot this is usually caused when a battery has been over charged a lot. once again some soot is normal what you are looking for is a lot of black soot. less soot the better.

I hope this helps some.

good luck I hope you find some good ones.

And PS. try to get the same size batteries with matching amp hr. ratings.

[Flux]

Luckeydog has covered it pretty well. You may not have the luxury of charging and load testing them unless he lets you take them on trial and bring back what you don't want.

The other clue is to look for differences between cells, if they have link bars you can check voltage, if not you can only check s.g.

Batteries with one cell low in volts or s.g. have almost certainly been scrapped as faulty. If everything is equal it may have been scrapped for other reasons.

If they are cheap and plentiful this could be worth the trouble but don't expect long term life from them, most will have been used for most of the useful life.

Don't mix different sizes or types in series strings but you can parallel strings of different type. You are not dealing with ideal batteries so you can bend the rules a bit.

Flux

[DanB]

some other stuff I would look for if I were browsing a pile of questionable batteries.

I would probably reject any 6V batteries that were below about 6V (or at least the high fives).

I dont think bulged sides are necessarily bad - but if the sides of the cases are bulged, they should be flexible (not rock hard - if they're hard then the plates are probably warped).

Look at the positive terminal - if its 'raised' above the top of the case (compare it to the neg terminal) that's a bad sign.  By raised I mean - you can see the plastic around it is slightly deformed into a slight 'mound' at the top of which is the pos terminal.  I see that in most all dead lead acid batteries and I'd never take one home that showed that sort of damage.

[dastardlydan]

Well this is the way it works .

I can exchange my old dead 6 volts for better

ones .

there is no money changing hands.

I have 11 of them all getting bad slowy.

will take you alls advice ,look for the ones that

read 6 + volts, and hope for the best.

Thanks for the info.