Making batteries safer...

[boguslaw]

The alum reacts with lead sulphate creating soluble salt thus removing sulfation immediately. The similar method was used long time ago with a mix magnesium salt and alum. That what I learned. I think it is reasonable explanation.

http://ysuusy.com/Lead_Acid_Car_Battery_Repair.html

[Vortex]

I used durkee alum distilled water mix in 2 batteries and they both charged great. I'll post details later.

Alkaline or acid, I don't know but the mix worked.

The old sulfuric acid solution in both batteries were poured into a bucket of water and arm and hammer baking soda...there were no bubbles whatsoever.

How long ago did you purchase your Durkee Alum?
Do you still have the Battery?
Please stick something into the battery solution and
then stick that something into some baking soda.
Does it bubble?

What is in Durkee Alum today might not be what is in
your Durkee Alum. It can be changed and still
be an Alum be definition.

[Aaron]

alum battery test

Hi Vortex,

I bought the durkee alumn a few weeks back. I got 2 jars of it and each was about $5.99 USD.

I added 2 jars of that to 1 gallon of distilled water that I bought from the same store. I poured out a bit in case it overflowed with the alum.

Actually, I put the alum in a vitamixer dry container and it turned the granules of alum into a fine powder like powdered sugar. I put it in ambient temperature distilled water and it dissolved immediately. I shook it up quite a bit just in case.

There were 2 batteries.

One was a 12v motorcycle battery that was sitting around for about 6 years and was at about 3 volts.

The other battery was a heavy duty car battery I had sitting in a Datsun 240Z for about 10 years...it showed 0.3 volts.

I took a plastic bucket and added water a bunch of arm and hammer baking soda (sodium bicarbonate).

Each battery I took off the caps and directly poured the battery solution into the bucket and there was no bubbling at all. I don't have any more of the solution to mess with.

After it was all poured out, I added distilled water without alum into each battery to the top and shook them up pretty good. I then poured that out into the bucket as well. I repeated that one more time to flush it out pretty good.

All 3 times...original solution and 2 distilled water rinses...towards the end there was dark colored stuff, which I assume is the junk that breaks off and settles in the bottom.

What I saw is that when the batteries had everything poured out of them, the voltage on them was higher than with the solution. Maybe crud was shoring the cells or whatever.

I then filled each battery to the top with the alum distilled water mix (2 jars of alum with 1 gallon of distilled) and closed the caps.

Just by doing that, each battery shot up a few volts without charging.

Boths batts I charged with the same charger at different times. A 12v 3a charger normally intended for an electric scooter...charges 2 12v's at the same time for a 24v bank in the scooter.

The car battery voltage went up to the high 14v range and slowly came down to the 10-11v range and overnight it was at a high 12v.

The motorcycle battery overnight went to about 10-11 volts.

I did this 2 nights in a row and the voltage was about the same after the dropped down a bit.

This was maybe 1.5-2 weeks ago when I did this and have not charged them since. Also, I did do any load tests to see what they can do. However, the motorcycle battery, I did use that to power the relay on the plasma ignition circuit and it worked fine. I did not charge it after that.

I just went out to measure them.

Car battery sitting at 4.8v
Motorcycle battery sitting at 7.6v

Before the whole alum deal

Car batt 0.3

Motorcycle 3 or so.

Anyway, it looks promising so far. I just have to charge discharge over and over to slap them into shape to see what happens. I'm just using the conventional 12v 3a charger for now.

[theremart]

Ok second battery attempt

Ok,

This time I rinsed the deep cycle battery 3X out with rain water. Used vitamix dry container ( nice blender ) like Aaron did to mix the alum. I ran the battery down from 12.40 to 11.96 V This is nominal battery it does hold about 10-16 amp hours.. but is rated at 85 amp hours.

After I refilled with alum and distilled water, voltage now at 11.86V Sweet

On the charger now.

[theremart]

Sucess!!!

I put a conventional charger on the battery 12V at 8 Amps, Battery worked up to 13.90V after 3 hours Took it off resting voltages about 12.70 -12.6V

I then put on a 1/2 amp load, it is now at 12.33V and holding. This looks like a winner, not bad for the first time charging, I bet if I give it a full charge with solar cells for a few day, it will perform much better.

[theremart]

Load test results.

After my 3rd cycle with this battery I have 17 + amp hours starting at over 12V down to 11V. As I understand from my reading it takes about 10 -20 cycles for batteries to get their full power. I may just stick this into my car so it gets good cycling. This is a deep cycle battery so that is why I took it down to 11V. ( normally don't like doing that ) Note this was with a 1 amp load.

It is giving much better load tests than it was before.


It is now charging to 14.5 V at 8 Amps conventional charge. To me this is a success!!

[mrbreau]

Breakthorugh?

Hello All? Like Mart, I was about to give in too. After two weeks of charging my alum conversion battery and getting to 11.41V it would not go any higher. It was actually dragging down the fanmotor charger a lot faster to where I had to recharge the primary battery every other day. The primary battery is a new one so I tried to protect it the best I could and wouldn't let the battery go below 12V.

Anyway, yesterday I decided to do some math and see exactly where this battery stood in relation to an SLA. At 11.4?V the battery had 1.9V per cell! An SLA fully charged is 2.1V per cell! Remembering something John Bedini had said about these batteries I started on the conditioning process of charge and discharge. What John said was that these batteries are NOT like the SLAs at all. A more complete log of how and where I got to this point can be gotten here:

Link; Imhotep's Lab Interactive FAQ • View topic - Battery conversion Acid to Alkaline

It is important to know that I'm doing TWO alum batteries at the same time! One is being charged with that fan motor and the other by a wallwart. The wallwart method DOES NOT CHARGE THESE BATTERIES AS WELL AS THE FAN MOTOR. In fact, using a regular battery charger on the alum battery heated the battery up so much I had to shut it down for fear the case would melt. As it was, the case was bulging from the softening of the case material. The absolute best I could do with this battery was 9.56V! Last night I discharged this battery, with a half amp tail light, down to 3.72V, at which point the light was barely on at all. It was still drawing 320mA! (The full specs on the battery and alum are at the above link.)

Now the fan motor charge: The first discharge was a real disappointment to me. Discharging with the tail light, I took the battery down to 10.05V in TEN MINUTES. I was afraid to go any lower as that would exceed the C20. (Then again, these batteries are NOT like SLAs.) After a four hours rest, the voltage jumped right back to 11.18V. So, reasoning that I didn't discharge the battery enough, I discharged the battery again to 9.10V and this time it took THIRTY MINUTES. Back on the charger after a half hour's rest, voltage went back to 10.90V in two hours. I left the battery charging all night and this morning I was back at 11.47V!

CLEARLY, THERE IS A NEED TO CONDITION THESE "ALKALAI" BATTERIES SO THEY WILL PERFORM.

Warren
..

"When a man's knowledge is not in order; the more of it he has, and the greater will be his confusion." Herbert Spencer

[theremart]

RE: Warren's comments.

I must agree Warren,

I have found that 10 -20 cycles is what is needed to get a battery up to full measure.

Some people just put this batter in their car, and let the alternator do the work for them


I am glad you are having sucess with the fan charging the alum. Yes, I can get to 11.5 V with the bedeni type charge, but it goes up even better if I use conventional 3 -8 amp charge or... use a solar charge.

I will have to try a wheel charge on mine again, might even try solid state...

Thanks for your info Warren.

mart

[rmay635703]

I have seen conflicting messages on the voltage and freezing point of lead alum batteries.

Of those of you who have done lead alum conversions what standing voltage did your batteries achieve?

All of mine so far have been around 11.8 volts after being charged. Some on the yahoo group claim they go up to 14v and I am curious what the differences are between the different conversions. If it might have to do with the level of sulphation or the method of charge AKA brute force or bedini.

This also appears to tie into the freezing temperature, the higher the standing voltage the lower the freezing temperature.

After getting into this alum thing I still have several non-functional batteries that are shorted out. (I did before also)

After looking at this site

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~weza/

It seems it might not be that hard to reconstruct batteries (something I already figured) So I might have to see what type of results I get rebuilding old batteries that have shorts I have a feeling though that the material might be too corroded to remove without decomposing but I guess we will see.

My father now has an electric mini van that came with 2 bad batteries but I don't believe the alum conversion works on AGM (Glass mat) batteries.

Any ideas what factor changes the resting voltage of an alum battery?

I would like to do a conversion 100% flawless before I start working on my 9 aged electric car batteries as I don't want to mess them up

Cheers
Ryan

[dambit]

general Q about batteries

Hi Guys,

Sorry if this is in the wrong thread.

I have a 12V car battery that was working perfectly yesterday and today will not even run the radio. I noticed no reduction in starting power until today. It is about 2 yrs old and the last one I had was the same make and rating and it lasted 4 yrs.

What would cause this to happen? Built in design flaws or just an unlucky purchase.

Cheers,

Steve.

[theremart]

Battery problems..

Hi Guys,

I have a 12V car battery that was working perfectly yesterday and today will not even run the radio. I noticed no reduction in starting power until today. It is about 2 yrs old and the last one I had was the same make and rating and it lasted 4 yrs.


Steve.

Test each cells voltage. You probably have a short, a piece of lead broke off and is now shorting the plates. this drains the battery down.

I have found using coat hangers as shown on youtube videos.

See videos at the bottom of this page.

Battery Reconditioning and Rebuilding Supplies for Automotive Lead/Acid Batteries


Best info I have found on testing batteries, next to the battery bible.

[wpage]

Storage battery tech needs work!

its is interesting to see that the lead acid battery we use today still are very much like they were in the mid 19th century...

Refreshing to see that we may be close to breaking thru to something more "current"

You have to wonder what the university and corp labs have been doing all this time?

W

[rmay635703]

You have to wonder what the university and corp labs have been doing all this time?

W

It seems most corps have been trying to reduce the amount of lead content in their battery pastes as much as possible while keeping the capacity & cranking amps the same.

They haven't paid a lot of attention to reliability though, it seems most of the batteries now have very little real warranty anymore. The few that do are much more expensive now that lead prices have skyrocked.

I have been watching the firefly lead carbon battery company for some time, might be interesting to see how lead carbon combined with alum electrolite would perform. (too bad you can't buy them anywhere)

[kcarring]

Nickel Iron (Edison) Style Cells.

Has anyone ever created a single cell (or multiple series) cells by way of using ABS pipe, nickel screen, isolator, and iron plate?

The technology is said to create batteries that last up to 70 yrs. I think you could use KOH or NaOH electrolyte, and if you went to a 1 mole solution, you wouldn't have too much freezing problems?

Edison spent a million dollars on these back when the electric car outnumbered the gas cars (oops what happened there?) and he got a car to go 100 miles between charge.

He had a special nickel plating and "flaking" process to increase surface area and density (that I cannot immediately replicate for $50) so I am going to try sandwiching nickel screen.

More here:
Nickel-iron battery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
and here Edison Battery Page

Ideas, comment?

[theremart]

RE: Edison batteries.

Zapp Works - Solar Panels and Nickel-Iron Batteries has the original edison cells, Homepage has the chinese (german) versions.

The correct term is Nickel Iron. The steel was the case, the iron and nickel were the electrodes.