There's an old-timer's dodge to get a little more life out of batteries. It involves draining the electrolyte, rinsing out any precipitated sulfate crystals that might be shorting the plates, and replacing the electrolyte with fresh, "fully charged" (high SG) electrolyte.
This may buy you a little more use, but you can't replace lost and degraded active material in the plates. A battery "restored" this way will be overdischarged with every cycle, and will thus continue degrading even faster. You also face the issue of disposing of used electrolyte and the water you used to rinse out the battery. Both can be pretty nasty stuff, with lead and other kinds of contamination. In the end, the only real fix for a worn out battery is to take off its cables and attach them to a new battery. Oh, one more comment that might be relevant. Sometimes all you have to do is give a battery a proper charge. I get the sense that some ICEheads don't have a clue how to do this. Some years back I went to a local battery dealer to buy a SLI for Margaret's ICEV. I got to chatting with the kid fetching my battery. This shop is located in a somewhat less prosperous area, and does a big business in $20 "refurbished" batteries for the Detroit-iron land yachts that ply the streets over there. So I asked the guy, "Just how DO you refurbish a battery?" "We charge it," he replied. David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA EVDL Administrator = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = EVDL Information: http://www.evdl.org/help/ = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Note: mail sent to "evpost" and "etpost" addresses will not reach me. To send a private message, please obtain my email address from the webpage http://www.evdl.org/help/ . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
