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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Wednesday, July 06, 2011 at 12:31:24 :
In Reply to: batteries posted by Dana (in Lancaster) [71.232.236.112] on Wednesday, July 06, 2011 at 11:33:02 :
I've noticed they're lighter weight for the same case size than they used to be. They can get lots of "CCAs" out of a little bit of lead by putting a lot of texture (surface area) on the plates, but that also makes them fragile and with less reserve for when they start to get sulfated. CCAs are only a measure of the peak current you can draw out of a new battery. They're not any kind of measure of how "good" the battery is, and sometimes they go in the opposite direction of how long it will last and how much abuse it will withstand. I'll always buy the weightiest battery I can find in a given case size.
I'm pretty sure there are only two battery manufacturers left, Dekka and Exide. All the others are OEMed from them.
If a battery self-discharges as you described, and you know there's no load on it, the first thing to do is check all the cells with a hydrometer. That's a common old tool that's not used much any more, and perhaps not much understood, but it will tell you way more about the condition of a battery and why it's not working than a simple voltage measurement will. Before you junk it, charge the heck out of it. I'll put 5 amps through a battery for a week to see if I can bring it back to life before I junk it. Most "automatic" battery chargers do not do a good job of charging a sulfated battery or one in which the cells don't match very well any more. You can put 5 amps through a normal car battery forever without doing it any damage other than having to add water. You can leave the caps off to make it easy to check the electrolyte level. Make sure the plates are always covered. Once you've charged it for a week, check all the cells with the hydrometer, let it set a day, and then check again. At that point, if you have one cell that's gone down way more than the others, there's no hope for the battery, but often, this doctoring is enough to get another couple years' life out of it.
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