A friend bought a new charger a while ago called a pulse charger by Extreme. He lent it to me when my two 12v deep cycle batteries were dead in the MH. I took them both out and hook them to the pulse charger, it turned out that one had a short and the other was OK but drained. The pulse charger was able to put life back into the good one which I married up to a new one from Costco.
That was nearly two years ago, and I finally got around to buying my own pulse charger. When I pulled the cover off the batteries, I was met with a carpet of fuzz over the older battery. I considered trying to revive it after I cleaned it up, but it was over four years old, so I opted for another Costco replacement. We do a lot of desert camping and dead batteries can be a big problem.
I am looking forward to seeing if this cool new pulse charger will keep my batteries in good shape, but I think it makes sense to start with batteries that are in good shape.
Winnipeg wrote: The pulse charger was able to put life back into the good one which I married up to a new one from Costco.
That was nearly two years ago, and I finally got around to buying my own pulse charger. When I pulled the cover off the batteries, I was met with a carpet of fuzz over the older battery. I considered trying to revive it after I cleaned it up, but it was over four years old, so I opted for another Costco replacement. We do a lot of desert camping and dead batteries can be a big problem.
Normally the experts recommend replacing all batteries at once with matched sets (same brand, capacity, and age). Here is a posting by Trojan Battery on that topic:
Trojan:
"Ideally, the entire set of batteries should be replaced. The behavior of batteries during discharging and charging varies throughout their lifespan and if all the batteries are the same age, then they all will have similar responses. You can, however, replace just the one bad battery with a new battery, but you will have to keep a close eye on the new battery as it will consume more water than the older batteries. The danger with replacing only one battery is that the older batteries tend to require more charge than newer batteries, and since the new batteries are in the same circuit, they too will be overcharged. There is also the chance that the older batteries will be undercharged since the overall voltage response of all the batteries (old and new) will not be a good representation of either group. The charging system might erroneously think that ALL the batteries have reached the desired voltage and it may stop the charging of the batteries prematurely. Simply make sure that you keep a close eye on your batteries and you should be okay."
Did anyone besides me notice the last sentence in the information from Trojan contradicts everything they said before it. They want you to buy more batteries(-:
jauguston wrote: Did anyone besides me notice the last sentence in the information from Trojan contradicts everything they said before it. They want you to buy more batteries(-:
I don't think they (Trojan) made any conflicting statements. If you noticed, all their prior statements were filled with "may" do this or that, "might erroneously" do this or that. Nothing bad, positively "will" happen.
The last sentence doesn't say that the odds are in favor of nothing going bad, it simply implies that "keeping a close eye on your batteries" would include taking proper action in case any of the listed possibilities do occur.
Pulse Tech makes a nice product. I also bave a BatteryMinder in which I brought back to life a three year old lawnmower battery and ran it for about 6 or 7 more years. The biggest diference between the models I have is the pulse Tech will charge a battery faster and maintain it where as the BatteryMinder must have a more charged battery to start with and it will just maintain it.
Center tap transformer in regular battery charger....pulse....pulse....pulse
Output of high frequency charger....squeek....squeek....squeek (faster pulsing).
What is needed are double blind studies. A few dozen real batteries like L-16's. Periodic weight measurement. kWh data, then finally, plate by plate analysis after X number of kWh transactions.
I tried up to a (3Ø) 10KVA variable oscillator with a horrendous lack of success, but you ought to see what that baby did to an L-16 at 7% output at 110KHZ. Yeah it was done in terminal frustration. It managed to peel all the active portion off the plates and send it to Davy Jonses' Locker while leaving all the hard crystallized sulfation perfectly alone. Southern California Edison was mighty, mighty happy with my 2-years of pulse charging experimentation! The OEM representative wasn't impressed even when the lid managed to achieve an altitude of 10+ meters.
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