What do I need to know to build a good lead acid battery?

[Jetijs]

Hi.
Currently I am conditioning some dead 200Ah bateries with my Bedini self oscillator. They are getting better and better, but eventualy they reach their best capacity and that is about half or less of the original battery capacity. This is so because the battery plates are in bad condition as the batteries were abused very much. A new 200Ah battery costs about 350-400$, I got these dead ones for nothing. But it takes a long time to get some usable capacity back from them and in the end you get a big (in size) battery bank that has only a fraction of the rated capacity. That is not very practical. So I guess that it could be much cheaper to build some lead acid batteries from scrach. The target size would be some 3000-4000Ah, because I calculated that this is what I would need to power my household needs in a event of blackout. Also I am working on a big wind turbine and a need for such a big storage battery becomes greater and greater. So what do I need to build a good lead acid battery? I can get lead sheets. I can get acid electrolyte mixture. I can build custom casing. But I need some advice.
1. What would the best plate thickness be? How thick are the plates in deep cell marine batteries?
2. How can I calculate the amp hour rating depending on the plate surface area?
3. What would be the best to use as a spacer between plates?

I intend to charge this battery only with Bedini type radiant chargers for the first time on.
Any input would be apreciated
Thank you,
Jetijs

[Inquorate]

Good question

Here's another; can an old battery's lead plates be sanded back and re-used?

[Jetijs]

No, car batteries have plates so thin, that any sanding is just pointless. The best you can do with them is melt the plates and get some lead out form them. But if the plates are just sulfated, but in good physical condition (not deformed or fallen apart) then you can get them to near new condition or even better using a Bedini type charger

[Jetijs]

Here is a picture of the current battery bank that I am trying to recover:



Judging form all the other such batteries (that also were abused), that I recovered to a somewhat usable level, I will probably manage to get about 200-300Ah out from this battery bank and that is a capacity of one of those batteries if they were new. Not a practical use of space

[ren]

Jet Ive had the same thoughts of late. Batteries are so expensive when you get up to the 1000's of amp hours. Id love to see some more details regarding build a custom set.

Heres a start.

the Otherpower.com Discussion Board || Comments Build a Battery

How can I make an electrical battery at home?

There was some talk of this on the monopole forums, but Im not sure how far ahead they went with it.

[Inquorate]

Good batteries seem hard to make

Here's a link.. My eyes glazed over reading about the chemistry and then the methods used to make more efficient batteries - holes, pastes - made me realise I'm just going to ask for some overtime at work, and buy one. On a positive note, I know I'm not getting ripped off now :-)

Lead-acid battery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Vortex]

tinkered around

I've tinkered around with building cells. The size of the cell seems only to
effect the amps and has little to no effect on voltage, which is kinda strange.
Materials used and construction effects the voltages. Solutions will effect
both voltage and amps, but more so the amps than the voltages.

I've wanted to build some small cells with water to run with the Joule Thief
emergency lighting, just add water... but it kinda hard without know the amps
I'm getting. I'm going to have to purchase something I can't burn up so easy

Additional references:
Homemade_Batteries
I've wondered how effective this Aluminum Can battery is since they are coated inside.
Copper of any size stuck into a can with only water will yield
about 0.7 volts. I fried the amps on my meter so that's unknown.
Directory:Batteries - PESWiki
at the above link search for "The "Battery Bible" -- DOWNLOAD" which is a pdf
file called Bedini-The_Battery_Bible.pdf this is a old Service Manual Document
for the Battery Service People from 1922. When they would come to use an
"Service" you batteries. 472 pages.

Randy

[sigzidfit]

Jetijs,

I originally posted this over in The Earth Battery SG Thread. Perhaps it will help.

Elementary Treatise on Electric ... - Google Book Search

Looking forward to seeing your progress on this endeavor.

Peace
PJ

[Vortex]

Jetijs,

I originally posted this over in The Earth Battery SG Thread. Perhaps it will help.

Elementary Treatise on Electric ... - Google Book Search

Looking forward to seeing your progress on this endeavor.

Peace
PJ

I had not seen this before.
Fantasy 1882 This is time zone of special interest before 1900.
I will repost the full name of the book
Elementary Treatise on Electric Batteries by Alfred Niaudet
so people doing a search might find it.

I was blind and now I see...
I had known google was scanning books, but never when there to do a search.
I went to there for the first time just now and found this:
Books 1 - 100 of 15,700 on batteries published between date:1800-1900
Oh My Word .. I'm in heaven ..ah.

Randy

[dutchdivco]

Have you tried 're-conditioning?'

Jetsis; Before you go to the trouble of building your own, have you tried reconditioning? Saw a thread on another site, talked about draining battery, fill with H2o and EDTA.(A man made amino acid, been around since the '50's.Its a chellating agent, an amino acid thats still the treatment of choice for lead poisoning.Its sold in health food stores, and over the internet.) Anyway, then rinse and fill with new batch of acid and distilled H20. I think that was it, I'll see if I can find the post, if your interested. Jim

[Jetijs]

Jim, the batteries I have are beyond repair, the plates are in a condition so bad, that it is just not worth to try

[patmac]

Jetjs... Yeah, I like this topic, this is a good topic, we need good batteries if we want improve our FE systems, we need low impendance batteries, individual cells, then we charge them in paralel and we can use them in series to get more potential.

I think that we need to build batts with relatively, big plates, then this is a equilibrium between, MAX amps, and MAX amps hours. this calculations is seemed to calculation to builds capacitors.

I was thinking on use graphite, zinc and lemon juice or something like this...

Another idea is try to galvanize a iron rod by using zinc oxide.

Did anybody tried reconverting lead acid batt to alkaline batt?

[Jetijs]

ok I got the price quote for lead sheets. A 1x1m 0.5mm thick plate costs about 25$. So not very cheap. I think that it would be better to buy only one such sheet, make a small test battery and then just test what amp hours can be achieved with this much material. This will give some data to calculate if a self made battery is cheaper that commercial one.

[patmac]

Jetijs

It's, true, I would like to try many differents ways about how the cells is connected, I think that itself must seems to HHO cells for use them with radiant spike energy. It is possible on normal battery radiant spikes is lost near to cells connections, we can build cells not like a cube, maybe it's better like a capacitor cilinder with connections negatives and postives on both sides, in this way radiant spikes can hit the plates completly.

[mlindeblom]

nickel iron battery

Since the active battery action is in the potasium hydroxide electrolite, I think the nickel electrodes could be nickel plated iron in an nickel iron battery.

Plating iron electrodes and using a soap making caustic might be a better home made candidate.

The no damage deep cycle capability may offset the lower energy density.

Nickel Iron Batteries