Battery Buggery

July 10th, 2006

Hello, bought a sealed lead-acid battery off of ebay for a fiver recently and it will not charge. I’ve done some research and it looks like its down to sulphation, lead sulphate forming on the plates because of being left in an uncharged state for a long period. I measured the charge current at 60 microamps initially and have had it wired up to my power supply for 3 days now and the charge current has hit a wapping 4.7 milliamps, hmmm I have the design for a small electronic circuit to build that is meant to desulphate batteries, it’s quite a simple idea that pulses the charge current at 50 milli second intervals up to 6Amps, which is more than enough for a 7Ah battery, from forums I’ve read the success rate is very high, though patience is required as it could take weeks to significantly improve the performance to a point where the battery would be usable. All a bit long winded, but hey I gotta do something otherwise my brain will dry up and come out my ears in powder form. Or did that happen already?

Anyway I may get onto that and will bore you all to tears with it in the future no doubt, BUGGER! Just been offered a job in Brighton, Embedded Systems Test Engineer at £35 an hour but I have no Visual Basic experience, man that sucks! But the girl on the phone sounded very nice and I now have her email address 😉 Blimey, I’m sounding desperate now, no surprise really…Well Chain’s off to the Quacks good luck matey, the charge current on that battery has risen to 5.2 milliamps in the time its taken me to type this, about 1 hour as phone ringing and chatting to Angel on MSN too. Maybe load up that program to design the inductors required for this desulphation circuit, or maybe just wait till I can just buy them, £1.20 each not exactly gonna force me to remortgage is it? Popped in to see Cam today who’s off work with a dodgey arm, had a good old natter, we’re like a couple of old women putting the world to rights when we get together but it’s cool.

Entry Filed under: Technical