Well, that was kinda a joke,
but I really did those steps “babying” a 2013 bought battery out to year 2020.
I bought a new battery in 2020
and after I wrote that post I went out and put the Pulsetech charger on it and within 6 hours the green LED indicating 100% was lit and the power going into the battery from the charger had dropped from 41 watts to 10 watts, which is about 0.7 amps of trickle charge.
In 1976 “Jeffery Battery Powered Ramcars” commonly hauled or “shutltled” coal in the mines the short distance from continuous miner to conveyor belt. A set of batteries cost $30,000 back then and it paid to carefully check them cell by cell to get another year’s use. Individual cells were held in place with tar, and you could pull a bad cell and replace it with a good cell. A remember the Trojan Battery Company had a particularly good field rep who would travel around educating about lead acid batteries.
There is also the still debated issue whether to add a chemical like cadmium sulfate in tiny amounts to a bad cell:
sample quote
A first test cell was built and put on charge. Within minutes its voltage climbed beyond gassing potential and kept climbing. The potential finally settled at 2.95V at 130mA. The cell was left on charge for two days, then discharge tested. The sulfated negative plate delivered less than 10% of its original capacity. The test was repeated twice. The capacity did not rise. A few grams of cadmium sulfate was then introduced into the electrolyte and stirred. About an hour later, the cell began to slowly draw more current, its voltage fell. It was now accepting charge. The cell was cycled three more times. By the last cycle, the capacity of the negative had risen to 20% of its original capacity. Additional cycling over a period of several days did not improve this figure.
A total of three negative plates were tested with cadmium sulfate. The amounts of cadmium sulfate were varied. It was immediately apparent that very little should be used to avoid severe dendrite growth of cadmium on the negatives. All three negative plates provided essentially the same 20% Ah results.
...snip...
We tried aluminum sulfate, magnesium sulfate, sodium sulfate and zinc sulfate. They appeared to do no harm, provided no benefit - charging with or without was equally effective. EDTA damages the battery.
A combination of pulse charging and cadmium sulfate treatment is commonly used by commercial lead-acid battery reconditioning specialists. Their "feedstock" consists of worn out and neglected batteries. It takes a week and is known to provide a 30% recovery rate on reclaimed scrap batteries.
end quote
from
https://batteryvitamin.net/sulfation_remedies_demystifiedDidn’t we have a Moparts member “David in St Croix” who had big stationary lead acid batteries he did maintenance on for overnight house power from his solar cells?
I wonder what experience he has had maintaining those batteries....
