Sealed Lead Acid Battery Recovery

hi I'm Mikey Sklar of holy scrap hot springs and today I want to show you how I repair sealed lead-acid batteries so here's a old sealed lead-acid battery it's pretty rough it's been sitting in my yard for about four years uncharged I really haven't looked into it at all but I can tell you before I even start working with this battery it's dry it needs water so let me go through the process of how I recover sealed lead-acid batteries so first step in recovering any battery is just to clean it up a little so you don't make more of a mess this is a some biodiesel but any type of olive oil or kerosene would also work for just really cleaning up the outer casing let's see it looks a lot better already - all the crap that's on there but we just want to keep the battery really clean when we open it up sometimes film ordered the next step with recovering an SLA battery is we're gonna have to cut this thing open so I have this kind of razor that I'm just gonna go around the edge and really try to get in to this edge to the point where I can I can pry this top off and what if I find if I do about three passes with the razor it's enough that I can start sliding the razor under so I went ahead and just place the razor right in here straight up and down and just started to pry it right up so I just do that tilt and you can see it starts to lift we're really starting to see some lift here then I go around and just keep doing that and once it I feel like I got a side pretty well up you can switch over to a screwdriver kind of use that combination now to really lift it up you want to be gentle we don't want to crack the top so just gently work the screwdriver under the case take your time I have crack knees before it's embarrassing so now I have not tried to charge this battery in the last five years so it's okay for me to open these caps but if I have been messing with this battery and trying to charge it before I refilled it these caps would be very dangerous they could actually spit out any liquid that was in there when it's when it's being open there'd be a lot of pressure potentially so just been charging so these caps come right off can wear gloves if you want I find they're really difficult to manage with gloves on you go ahead and just pull these caps right off with your fingers or with the screwdriver you're gonna want to save them okay you can see we got all the caps off and it's time to start refilling these cells with water I have a little cup of rainwater here and I like this like meat syringe you can buy these at Walmart in big-box stores and such but this meat syringe is really ideal I took off the metal syringe tip and just have it's on a little screw on thing but check this out I just stick it in the cup fill the syringe and just put it right over each cell and you can feel fast and this battery is so dry it's gonna take Oh between 20 and 30 milliliters per cell so it just took an entire syringe on that first cell just keep filling and do this for every cell just fill them up with water I find a dry battery can take just about one full syringe which in according to this is 30 milliliters so I just went ahead and filled this battery I did all 6 cells it took about about a third of a pint of this mason jar here of rainwater to do that and now it's time to charge it up so I'm gonna go ahead and use the pimp charger and there's two leads for the DC side of positive and a negative so those need to be placed correctly orientation wise so black to black red to red and there's a little AC plug in my case in the u.s. it's a 110 volt but international 220 is fine you just need the prong adapters for your type your plug shape and I'm gonna go ahead and start charging this so you can see we got gonna go ahead and plug in the AC side and let's take a look at what the voltage reading we're seeing on the pimp right now is so before charging I'm seeing about point 6 volts it's a little bright out yeah point 6 volts so that's really bad for a 12 volt battery so you know what because I know this battery's gonna have a ton of resistance I'm gonna turn the display off before I start really charging and hitting the black switch so here we go turning on the pin so I've been letting the pimp battery charger work on this battery for about one minute and a whole time I left the voltage display on but I'm gonna go ahead and turn it on now and I'm sorry head it off the whole time and we're just gonna see what the voltage is reading so it's up in the 55 yeah I would say 45 to 60 range it's jumping all over the place as it's pulsing and recovering here so what I'm gonna do is let it run for about 10 15 more minutes and see where we start to stabilize that and I'm gonna do a quick check of each cell at that point because what I'm really curious about is is this battery gonna be able to recover and we can find out very quickly if it's gonna have a full recovery so I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the display let it keep charging 10 15 minutes and I'll come back so you can see we were down into the 20 to 30 volt right now range for this battery recovery which is pretty good the resistance is still very high after even 15 minutes of letting it sit so I'm gonna have to let it keep charging but what we can do is we can turn off the charger see what it drops to it's in that about you know eleven point eight volt right now twelve point seven Oh keep dropping a little bit and we can check each cell and we can check and see which of these cells might be dead or weaker than others and get an idea of how the battery is doing out of its six different components so one of my favorite tricks is to use a multimeter set it to voltage DC and take its two probes positive negative I leave the positive right on the positive terminal of the battery and dip the negative into this acid for each cell for cell reading 1.2 volts that's great because if it were fully charged we'd be seeing somewhere between two and two and a half volts second cell see in about three volts great third cell five volts fourth cell seven volts fifth cell a little more in there nine volts six cell ten volts and then finally at the fan of terminal eleven point three four at the batteries holding on its own right now and it's gonna still drop a little bit real slow because we're just charging it but you know what this is the battery that's gonna recover this is a battery that we can get quite a bit of capacity out of still every cell is good now if I had been trying to charge this this battery without hmm if I had been trying to charge this battery and hadn't added water I would have blown a connection to one of the cells and we would not have six working cells as we did here we would only have like five working cells and that's why adding water is just one reason it's so critical to add water so you don't blow out the cells so this is a great battery we just need to keep charging it it's going to come back and have a long life

Channel: The Good Life Lab

Views: 4,384,344

Rating: 4.2774696 out of 5

Keywords: da pimp, battery charger, capacitive, desulfator, desulfate, mikey sklar, diy, sealed lead acid, recover, ups, electric, sla, charger, biodiesel, cell testing

Id: 2JIzSxqWids

Length: 8min 33sec (513 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 03 2013