how old are your flooded batteries

[BarracudaBob]

I haven't measure specific gravity in years. I top them off with distilled every couple of months. I have pick up a kit. Having the solar panel there to protect the tires will probably cause more issue with drying the batteries I had thought about putting a fan in the cabin to help keep it cool and dry. Morning dew soaks everything and then the afternoon heat kicks in. I have more power than I need to charge the boat batteries all week. Was also looking at a movable solar structure or even the tilt mounts and tie it back to the LPF. More power in all the wrong places

It was interesting to dive back in the old FLA cells.

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[DPC]

What do you do with the old electrolyte?

The correct answer to that is call the toxic taxi.
Back in the bush however thats not practical and it had to be neutralized with baking soda...

 

[Bluedog225]

The correct answer to that is call the toxic taxi.
Back in the bush however thats not practical and it had to be neutralized with baking soda...

I thought it was more complicated than just neutralizing the acid. Seems like an environmental disaster. Just to limp along a battery that’s about done.

 

[DPC]

I thought it was more complicated than just neutralizing the acid. Seems like an environmental disaster. Just to limp along a battery that’s about done.

YA it can be.

Used to be quite easy to just buy new acid and dump it old acid and not worry about the dumping part.
Cottage on an island makes you think a bit more but I can remember the solution to waste oil was to pour it someplace if would soak into the ground to vanish...

Attempts to neutralize it were based around the idea of " you don't want the dogs in it ".

Lead sludge from the bottom of the case, or wash tub and water were dumped on the ground.
I won't lie to you about that
Again we didn't know better, I didn't know better, I was just following direction from a man that told me how he's been doing this since the 1930s,
And not knowing how significant the amounts of spilled acid and lead oxides and sulphur compounds entered the environment never was a thought..

Even now until you really got me to think about it...
I never really thought about what we had been doing.

To keep batteries that are done working.
Again thinking back.
A set of used truck batteries were easy to get and they would often last a couple of seasons if gently used.
What killed them was sulphation and the washout boil out did make them work better.

I did the same with NiCad batteries at work.
No one ever brought up the Cadmium we were dumping.
I wonder would they let us do this today ( probably as long as its under ground there are very few rules about pollution )

 

[MiSh]

I just replaced my 2 Trojan T105s in my camper. They were in year 10 but sparsely used and kept on the charger. May have gotten a year or 2 more out of them but was concerned after the voltage dropped a bit more than normal on very light loads.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I just checked my UPS batteries for my server rack, 12v group 27 Canadian Tire batteries, installed date is 2013. At least one of them, can't see the sticker for the others but I seem to recall putting them in around the same time. These ones tend to fail catastrophically or at least the model before these did. Usually a cell shorts out. I had 3 of these models fail that way over the years but the ones I have now are a revision of the past model. I'll be replacing this whole setup with a -48v setup soon and probably going with Interstate GC2 batteries as a local battery shop has a pretty good price on those, and they're probably better than the Motomaster Canadian Tire ones.