Abused Batteries making a comeback'

ardb

On 7/30 I posted about cart I had just gotten that had new 6 volt batteries a year ago and never recharged again. Cart just sat idle.

Several batteries were down to 2.5 volts. Brought them up with a car charger then charged and ran a little everyday then back on charger.

Put on charger yesterday afternoon, charger only runs a few hrs.

This afternoon checked batts.

38.4 volts

Each batt at 6.4 volts

And batts hold up well for all my needs here in the village.

BGW

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vagabond

bxlt

Nice, I was able to bring life back into a 7 year old set and got 3 serviceable years out of them for what I used the cart for. They were pretty much done when I finally replaced them but allowed me to save up the money for the upgrade to 48v

cbv123

When I got my cart it had 5 year old batteries in them that hadn't been charged for, well, who knows? I assume a very long time because I had to charge in pairs with a car charger until I got the non-working cart charger fixed.

Even with the charger fixed, the pack struggled to get into the 37 volt range. The spare change jar didn't quite have enough nickels in it for a new set of batteries at the time, so I decided I'd just use 'em and abuse 'em until they completely gave up.

Turns out that after running them very low many times, but always charging immediately after, each time the voltage crept up a bit higher. The pack now regularly reads 38.6 volts after a 12 hour rest. Last long trip I took was 13 miles, and they read about 80% state of charge when I got home.

My theory is that by running the batteries way down on a regular basis, they got to spend a lot of time charging at a high amperage, which whittled away at the sulfation. Not at all recommended as a means of caring for good batteries, but with batteries that are already done for, what's there to lose?

bxlt

That's impressive and a good theory. With my pack I could get the voltage up to 38.6 on mine but after about a mile the voltage would drop to the 70%-80% range so I would assume my max range would have been about 4 miles max.

Like I said it worked for what I needed it for but I should have tried what you did to bring life back into them. But then again if I had done that it would have been a lot harder to get the wife to okay the new 48v pack