Is this a good deal?

[FarmerGreen]

I saw these batteries posted on ebay. It's a bank of 12 GNB Absolyte 3-100A-31 that have just been taken out of service. They are 7 years old. Each battery is rated at 1496 amp/hours. Opening bid is $200, but the reserve is $750. They were all tested last fall and were all performing just fine.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130504250931&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT#ht_894wt_1137

Also, what is required to charge such a large bank of batteries? Newbie question.

[DanG]

Those batteries could be said to have a design life in years of 20 @ 25°C.

They are back-up batteries that should not ever see real deep discharge in a perfect world.

These links are just the first ones I found.

http://www.norwatt.es/pdf/Tudor/bateria-absolyte-ipp-energias-alternativas.pdf

Start reading at page 18 of this one to get a handle on how delicate the recharging scheme is for these!

http://www.swiftpower.com/integrated/products/batteries/gnb/absolytellp/92_61.pdf

[dnix71]

We have GNB Absolytes in our walk behind Crown pallet jacks. They get dry inside after a while if overcharged. One of the lifts chargers was putting out 28.8 into a 24v nominal set of 4 6v's. That would have been fine if they were flooded. I drilled holes in them and added distilled water on Thursday and Friday. They seem to have recovered some capacity.

Those GNB's are too heavy to move without help and they need to remain in the rack or on their side until another rack is available. Those are too large to be set unright unless they are in a case. If you lived local to those batteries you could make an offer. The $200 reserve wasn't met. Moving them is the glitch, not the price asked. The seller mentions they are worth over $1k in scrap so I don't understand the $200 reserve. That would make me nervous about dealing with this particular person.

If they were actually good someone who rebuilds forklift batteries should make him an offer.

[FarmerGreen]

$200 was just the opening bid. The reserve was $750. I'm sure they were hoping the bidding would go higher than $750. I wonder what it would cost to have them shipped truck freight? If I get any I'll drive over and pick them up. They emailed me some info on them and they were tested just a few months ago and were fine, just over 2v per cell.
Instead of drilling on them, there is a removable plug on the front of the batteries. But that would require standing them up, I suppose. Maybe drilling them would be better. 

[dnix71]

The ad said they tested the batteries by checking the voltage. That isn't how it's done. The only legitimate test is under load. That was the problem we had with the forklift batteries. The voltage was fine, but they were dry and wouldn't put out enough current to lift a heavy pallet. After adding water they do. I noticed 2 vents each on our batteries but the entire top is sealed. The only option was to drill 3 holes each. Ours sit upright and the foil label was placed back over the holes. After some hard charging on Friday they held a higher voltage at rest than they normally do.

These eBay batteries are 8 years old they could very well be dry if overcharged. I just don't believe the explanation that they are perfectly good but some "insurance" company says they have to be replaced 8 years into a 20 year service life. It's very difficult to properly equalize a long string of AGM's because you have to be very careful about the voltage and current. After 8 years I would expect the string has a couple of cells that just don't hold up under load and that's the real reason they are trying to get rid of this setup. My home setup is all flooded batteries. I don't worry about overcharging because I can just add water as needed.

We also need to replace a 48v 750ah narrow aisle lift Raymond battery that is 7 years old. It isn't swelled up or leaking but it won't hold a proper charge. Crown has gotten back in the battery business here and the rep said 7 or 8 years is what they aim for. Less than that and they lose customers because that's what the lift owners expect out of a battery. More than that just isn't realistic.

[FarmerGreen]

Good info. How would I go about testing these under a load. The company says these were tested under a load last fall and all passed except one battery and it was replaced. How can I go about verifying these are good? Or bad?

[SparWeb]

They sure look a lot like mine.



What's on the E-bay listing is similar in technology but doesn't have quite the same layout as my set.  Dnix mentioned that his don't have valves to open and inspect inside.  Mine do, but I only tried it on one just out of curiosity (not much to see).

You can find a ton of info at the Exide website:   http://industrialenergy.exide.com/sub_navig.asp?main_description_en=Absolyte&lng=en&cl=np_brands

I have tested mine under load, and concluded that my really really old ones still carry about 70-80% charge when they act like they're full.  Which is great for me because I got them all for free.
Buried in the mountains of info you can get about the batteries from Exide, is a discharge curve for various rates, which you can line up with a test you can do with the right equipment.
I've rigged up banks of lights and resistors for my discharge tests, then regularly monitored the voltage as it dropped and the time it took to pass a certain threshold voltage.

Moving them is a major chore!!!  Anyone who can get to Tenessee should just arrive with a very large truck, give the guy 200 bucks cash, and haul them away because the E-bay seller probably can't move them himself!  Worth every penny if you could do it! 

[FarmerGreen]

They are stored in a warehouse and they have a forklift to load them for you. $200 is the opening bid, the reserve is $750. There is another ebay listing right now where they want $1000 per battery. Another listing has some for $4800 per set, but they've been stored for 5 years. Those 2 listings are in Atlanta.