I was really psyched this afternoon when my dead battery pyramid scheme actually worked. Here is how I swapped a few 10 year old totally dead car batteries for 3 year old gel based units that are in good shape.
1. Collect dead batteries from friends and neighbors.
2. Go to your local autoshop and ask if you can swap them their dead cores for your dead cores.
3. Use a multimeter to test the batteries at the autoshop. Anything with a 12.4V or higher is worth taking as is. A lower voltage means you need to crack open cells to measure specific gravity and individual cell voltage.
4 comments:
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
"The Princess Bride"
Good choice of quotes. Slightly alive is good enough.
can you explain #3 a little more? how do you measure the individual cell charge? where do you go from there if one is bad? just desulfate-orize the one cell or what? you really got my attention, i spend a fortune replacing 'dead' batteries.
Use a multimeter to test each cell. Put the positive meter lead on the positive battery terminal. Then place the meter negative lead in each of the battery cells. You should see about 2V charge increase between cells. If one cell is low like pretty much 0V difference from the surrounding cells then you have trouble.
A specific gravity tester can be used also. They cost $6 and tell you the charge of each cell.
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