Reconditioning a 12 Volt Car Battery: 100% Success

hey guys it's Jake from car groves and today we're going to be trying to revive old batteries with Epsom salt have several batteries that are either not cranking what they're in or just completely won't hold hold the charge at all I've put all of these on the charger over the last couple of days the weird thing is some of them will hold a charge they'll come up to you know 10 11 12 volts but then when you stick them in the like for instance the four-wheeler battery if we put this on here I'm showing 10.8 volts on it but it absolutely will not crank the boiler and this sat on a trickle charger for like three days right here is out of the Jeep one volt after charging for a day this one came out of the ether t 0.24 volts and this one crapped out on me in North Arkansas last month in the Lexus and I had to get a new battery two-point-seven alright let's talk about safety real quick wear eye protection wear some gloves maybe long sleeves I don't know I did have gloves and eye protection on do it in a place where you have ventilation that means you either can open doors or outside have a fan running just in case there's any fumes or chemicals that come out it's probably safer to have a fan blowing and then the other thing is I believe when you charge up a battery especially when you're reconditioning or put put a fresh mixture of solution in I believe they out gas a little bit so to be on the safe side and not blow caps or anything weird happen I'm gonna leave all the caps off these batteries while I'm charging them I don't think it makes a difference and if they come back up and charge we'll cap them off and be good to go is we're gonna take a solution of distilled water and Epsom salt we're gonna mix those together we're gonna dump out the acid in these batteries we're going to mix the Epsom salt water solution with the acid we're gonna flush these batteries out once they're empty and try to get any led or contaminants that are in the bottom out and then we're gonna refill them and put them on the charger and see if we can get them all up to 12 volts all right so one of the first steps we're going to do is we're going to heat up some distilled water you can get this pretty much anywhere for about like dollar 4d gallon so we're gonna heat up some of this in a large container and then we're gonna start feeding in our epsom salts and basically we want to make a pretty concentrated solution of Epsom salt and the heat is gonna help the salt dissolve all right once the water starts boiling just start feeding your Epsom salt in there and you just wanted to get it to dilute in the water and not have any freestanding salt at the bottom of the pan alright that was a four pound bag in one gallon of water and it completely dissolved so the real simple way to explain a battery is that it has lead plates running through it and it has a electrolyte solution commonly like sulfuric acid and the battery putting a charge to it from your alternator or however you're charging your batteries it'll actually hold that charge in the solution in the place over time the plates get I don't know how you would describe it corroded or oxidized the solution can't make a good contact to the plates and you lose charging power so you might have this battery on a charger for two days and only get it up to three volts or whatever it's because it just can't make enough contact to build the charge so the theory behind this is is that when you mix in the epson salt it creates a different reaction and cleans that scale off the lead plates which will allow it to charge so we're gonna give it a try it's basically a bad battery apocalypse month here at the car groves shop I've already replaced two or three batteries and a couple of these vehicles and so we're gonna try it on these old ones and see we can revive them as you guys know if you've priced batteries a little full wheeler battery like this is $90 a more traditional battery like this I think O'Reilly has informed some thinkingabout interstate battery for I think like 50 bucks but a new battery is pretty much over a hundred dollars or whatever you're gonna get so we're gonna see if we can revive these I think we're gonna be able to do four batteries for about 20 bucks total [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I don't know if y'all can see this in the bucket but it definitely has some heavy metals floating around in it and that could be one of the problems so we're gonna pull these caps on all these batteries dump this fluid out and check it out [Music] okay so now we're gonna rinse these batteries out and what we're trying to do is get metals like the lead off the bottom of the battery so it's not bridging the plates because sometimes batteries can go bad from lead bridging okay at this stage I'm letting the batteries drain upside down this is after we have dumped all the acid into a container and flush the batteries this is pretty weak solution you can handle it with your hands it shouldn't damage anything on your property okay so if you're wondering about the green battery all the other ones I went to drain him they kind of chugged out like you were emptying out of the container and they were noticeably empty the green battery I held it for like probably a couple minutes and it was just slowly dripping out I don't know if it was like the plate design in it or what so that when I decided not to flush just in case there was more acid in it Sleater key based off the top and fill the batteries back up the thinking behind that is that any heavy lead or any other metals that are in there would drop to the bottom and we're not gonna suck those up that way if any of the batteries have bridging issues that hopefully will be resolved so we'll see how it goes so I've got the epson salt and acid mixed together and this is what I'm using right here this little baster is called a Super Start bulb type battery filler and I got it at a rallies for like $5 [Applause] [Music] so we have the batteries filled with the epson salt and used acid solution a couple observations one be careful with the acid the epson salt and used acid solution that I was using the few drops that I got on the concrete you could visibly or audibly and visibly see that they were eating the concrete so yeah be careful don't get it on you or your concrete if you do neutralize it with some baking soda calcium maybe vinegar you have to look it up after the batteries were drained of their acid when I put them on the voltmeter they still read almost identical voltages dried to empty and then when I put the new solution in and checked them they still have the same you know one bolt on them so it kind of leads me believe that the charge is actually held in the plates two of the batteries have pop caps like traditional old-style tractor batteries you could pop the caps off the screwdriver it's just two caps and then underneath there were three cells the other two were sealed batteries but if you look really close you could see where the cells were and there were press fit caps in there and I was easily able to get them out with a small flat-head screwdriver I'm gonna put these batteries on the charger we'll come back in a couple hours and test them all and see what they did so it's been about six hours which is a little bit short of a time to do four batteries I went down the line I hit all the big ones with 54 J 50 amp for just a couple of minutes just to kind of initialize it so it's a kill then I did 10 amps on those three each for about 10 minutes and then I bumped it down the 2 amp I let them sit for about an hour and a half each on to amp the motorcycle battery I put on a 2 amp for about an hour and a half and I got a little frisky and I hit it with 50 for literally like 10 seconds and it pushed fluid out the top so don't do that don't put it on 50 for motorcycle battery but I'm excited I haven't tested them yet so this will be this will be the first go so let me see if I can do this ooh 12:7 all right so that one's good full wheeler battery 12:3 oh man this is working out better than I thought and [Music] man this is hard to do and show the camera 11:11 so that one's a need a little bit longer on the trickle and then I got this last one down here let's turn the let's turn it off 11.10 eleven point oh wait I'm I'm shocked so we just brought back all four of these batteries the last two are not quite at 12 yet but they probably had the least amount of time on the charger I'm pretty confident that if I leave these overnight on to amp that there will be 12 volts in the morning so I'm gonna call this a complete 100% success if you guys enjoy my videos please be sure to LIKE and subscribe thank you [Music] heck yeah saved me 90 bucks just on this one battery

Channel: Car Groves

Views: 2,643,444

Keywords: battery, bad battery, battery not taking a charge, cheap battery, recondtition battery, 12v battery, junk yard battery, roadkill, dirt everyday, diy battery

Id: 1Ut53ma4Gko

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018