Minerals don’t evaporate out of drinking water, if not become more concentrated.
Distilled water is sold at pharmacies for not much more than bottled water.
Forever if you just leave them in the bottle. I got a gallon jug of distilled water at my local grocery store for a buck or two. But do also hit the pharmacy isle and look for a small syringe to inject the water with. The holes in the battery are small and easy to vapor lock if you just try to pour the water in.
AGMs are not supposed to have any visible water level, that’s what makes them non-spillable. The fiber layers are supposed to be just moist enough to hold the electrolyte and allow for the chemical reactions.
KuoH
Great! Out of 6 cells I only need a reasonable service level from 3 to test the other components (motor and controller at 30 amps) before I splurge on a new set of cells (runtime is kind of important)
Thanks for the insight!
Any reason I don’t just fill it with electrolyte from the auto parts store?
That raises a question I’ve been wondering for a while - those cheap distilled water for drinking - are they really distilled?
Around here they’re priced very closely to filtered water and mineral water. How? I mean, distilling is a very expensive process. How can it maintain similar price against running tap water through a filter?
Makes me wonder if they’re real, and usable a such.
Anybody recommend a ready-to-use desulfator? Or a kit with everything needed to build? For just a single unit I'd really rather not have to go through sourcing all the individual parts.
You’ll have to do some reading to get the complete facts, but from what I understand, SLAs are manufactured with the proper amount of electrolyte for efficient chemical reactions and no excess byproducts. Adding more would just upset that balance, as would letting any leak out. I’m not sure whether it’s the oxygen, hydrogen or both that leaks as a result of overcharging, but adding only distilled water supposedly replenishes that.
As for the purity of store variety distilled water, I don’t know, but the label says the process includes reverse osmosis, distillation, microfiltration and ozonation. I guess I’m not too concerned given the price even if it can only eek out another year or two of useable battery life. Hopefully, it’ll be better than that.
KuoH
There are lots on ebay. I went with one of the cheap ones and I’m happy with it, though I’ve only been at this for a month or so. I figured it wasn’t much to lose if this was all just hogwash.
I also went with one of these battery analyzers to log what’s being put into and pulled out of the battery.
KuoH
Some good information to read on Battery Sulfation before you buy a ton of desulfanators: BU-804b: Sulfation and How to Prevent it - Battery University
One video was saying that rainwater is a great source for distilled water. We’re getting plenty of that in the next few days!
Kids these days, I swear...
no it is not, it is full of particulate and dust and organic chemicals it picks up from the atmosphere
I'm going out on a limb here and guessing they are all toast and nothing you can do will make them worth doing anything more than recycling them .
4 volts sounds really really bad
I’ll pick some up tomorrow at Walgreens and see how it goes.
That little watt meter looks like just the ticket for doing some analysis. Just order the last one out of Cali. Hopefully have it in hand when I start testing.
kuoh, any idea what that 3-pin connector on the side is about?
One is reading sub-1V and I am not holding up hope for that one. What I need to find out is if I have 1 or 2 good motors… and 1 or 2 good 30Amp controllers. I don’t want to drop $65 on 3 new batteries just to find out I have nothing to use them on.
perhaps you have some high drain li ion (not the regular type we use for flashlights) that you can use to try your equipment?
4 volts suggests that it has 4 crook cells.
I wish… but that would open a new discussion… how to “properly” charge a 10S2P pack?
The youtube crowd seems bent on proving that you can recover these types of problems, if not 100%, to some extent. The theory is sound enough. It all depends on the level of battery destroying buildup.
Not necessarily, they could just be severely discharged. Like I said, I’ve recovered one of these that measured less than 1V just by adding some water and slow charge + desulphating. It’s not brand new, but it will run my POB HID for almost 40 minutes, not bad for a virtually dead battery. Hopefully capacity will improve with more time on the desulphator, but only time will tell.
KuoH
If nothing else, they can be converted to normal lead acid batteries by simply filling the water near to the top. They will no longer be non-spillable, but the water will allow the chemical reactions to occur whether or not the fiber layers have lost direct contact with the plates. At this point, all that matters is the level of sulphation on the plates and how much of it can be reversed. If converting to straight lead acid, then additional electrolyte may be needed, but aggressive outgassing may occur while charging and would need to be addressed.
KuoH