Normally I don't play with battery trash, but I brought back a small 34ah agm that was SEVEN years old, new-old-stock and totally sulfated from 7 years of self discharge.
Victim: CSB EVX-12340 agm. Manufactured 8/2008 per sticker and heat-stamp on bottom. Rated 34ah but sitting at 4.2v ocv.
Found in buddies cool garage that never got used for anything, so I gave it a shot. I have a working year-old CSB 12200 20ah for another project, so that started the conversation.
Battery Tender did the classic immediate charge and drop to float - too sulfated.
Noco Genius and Optimate 6 chargers - both detected low voltage and went into higher voltage recovery. Both timed out after 5 successive restarts. This puppy is too far gone. Indications are either total sulfation, or a bad cell.
Battery Minder 2012-AGM. This worked! Battery Minder's do things the slow way with a different recovery method. It took 3 days to get out of intensive care, but finally stabilized as good. All error test led's finally went out after a few automated test/charge cycles. Left on float for 3 more days before minor discharge testing (20% DOD) revealed that it wasn't tricking me and acting somewhat normally.
I won't get into the subject of desulfation frequency sweeps, and whether this helped or was benign. That subject has been covered elsewhere. Regardless of how you feel about that subject, the charger did a great job.
Could I have done the same manually with a bench power supply, and a lot of time babysitting / tweaking voltage and current the whole process for 3 days or more? Possibly, but my time is worth just a little more than that.
I still have more testing to do. A few more days of cycling, and I'll measure the internal resistance (should be about 8 mohm for this model) and do a capacity test.
The CSB's are only rated for an 8 year life in float, so the fact that this thing isn't totally dried-out, doing endless absorb, or sucking down too much current in float is encouraging. Maybe it isn't totally dried-out.
I was expecting a bad cell, warped / shorted plates, dendrites puncturing the separators - you name it. So far so good and it appears that all I have is an undamaged old new-old-stock battery that was just totally sulfated.
I like my other chargers, so this isn't hype for Battery Minder - all I can say is that *under this condition*, the 2012-AGM charger did the trick, and did a very good job of it.
More testing results in a couple of days. I don't buy battery trash normally, but this freebie for testing I just couldn't pass up.
Victim: CSB EVX-12340 agm. Manufactured 8/2008 per sticker and heat-stamp on bottom. Rated 34ah but sitting at 4.2v ocv.
Found in buddies cool garage that never got used for anything, so I gave it a shot. I have a working year-old CSB 12200 20ah for another project, so that started the conversation.
Battery Tender did the classic immediate charge and drop to float - too sulfated.
Noco Genius and Optimate 6 chargers - both detected low voltage and went into higher voltage recovery. Both timed out after 5 successive restarts. This puppy is too far gone. Indications are either total sulfation, or a bad cell.
Battery Minder 2012-AGM. This worked! Battery Minder's do things the slow way with a different recovery method. It took 3 days to get out of intensive care, but finally stabilized as good. All error test led's finally went out after a few automated test/charge cycles. Left on float for 3 more days before minor discharge testing (20% DOD) revealed that it wasn't tricking me and acting somewhat normally.
I won't get into the subject of desulfation frequency sweeps, and whether this helped or was benign. That subject has been covered elsewhere. Regardless of how you feel about that subject, the charger did a great job.
Could I have done the same manually with a bench power supply, and a lot of time babysitting / tweaking voltage and current the whole process for 3 days or more? Possibly, but my time is worth just a little more than that.
I still have more testing to do. A few more days of cycling, and I'll measure the internal resistance (should be about 8 mohm for this model) and do a capacity test.
The CSB's are only rated for an 8 year life in float, so the fact that this thing isn't totally dried-out, doing endless absorb, or sucking down too much current in float is encouraging. Maybe it isn't totally dried-out.
I was expecting a bad cell, warped / shorted plates, dendrites puncturing the separators - you name it. So far so good and it appears that all I have is an undamaged old new-old-stock battery that was just totally sulfated.
I like my other chargers, so this isn't hype for Battery Minder - all I can say is that *under this condition*, the 2012-AGM charger did the trick, and did a very good job of it.
More testing results in a couple of days. I don't buy battery trash normally, but this freebie for testing I just couldn't pass up.
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