If you take a lead acid battery and discharge all the way to say 95-100% and then start to recharge with in a few minutes, will it hurt the battery significantly? More or less, could you take it to ~11.0v and then recharge it immediately with minimal effects? Our supermileage car would use a 9ah battery to start the engine ~25 times, but sometimes we would do two runs, so a total of 50 starts, which would completely drain the battery. After that, we would charge the battery immediately. I was wondering how much damage we did to the battery.
I did do a test on that particular battery, which had been used for 3 years, and it had at least 5.5ah's in it. I'm not sure how many more amp hours I could squeeze out of it, but probably not many.
I am curious for the answer to this question because I don't get to work with lead acid batteries very often.
I end up replacing the battery in my 4-wheeler every 1-2 years due to it's extreme environment. I take it out during the winter and charge it every month, same with my lawnmower too.
For my supermileage car, we are thinking of purchasing a 80-100ah battery for off grid battery charging of our lipo and life starter batteries. I have my 400/750 watt inverter and we have our battery charger that runs off of 5-30v dc, so it would be nice to have portable power. My concern is that purchasing a Pb battery that gets used only once a year may not be a great idea. We could charge it every 3 months, assuming people remember to. During competition, it would be drained down by 20-40 ah and then recharged at the end of the day. Loads would be upwards of 30 amps for the charger and possibly up to 40 for the inverter.
Recently I have been looking at the new 65/130 C lipo thunder power batteries. They claim an impressive 12c charge rate, which means only 5 minutes! I have charged at 4c and 5c with my current Life and Lipo batteries, but they do tend to get warm (the life batteries). The lipos stay cool all the way to the end, which impressed me majorly at 5c. The interesting part is that the new 65/130c batteries are the same price as my 30/60c cells. Things like this excite me, especially when you think you can start our engine off of a 800 mah battery or less... (our starter pulls only ~30 amps continuous).
Sorry for going so far off my question, but there was a lot of things to say
TaylorP035