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Re: Which Battery to Buy?
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Re: Which Battery to Buy?
Counterfeits are always possible.
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Re: Which Battery to Buy?
My wife and I are into cars...we have eight of them registered/insured right now. With a fleet this size, I get to deal with battery maintenance as a regular thing. Years ago, I decided the solution is to replace batteries every five years, and use the least expensive batteries I can find. It's worked great, I haven't had any battery or charging system failures for a long long time.
With the sealed batteries that we use in robotics, the same thing applies, but I would put the expected lifetime (for our team) closer to three years...mainly because of iffy battery maintenance. I can't seem to get anyone else to care about them, and I've given up trying. I (and the teachers) don't have access to the school during summer, and I'm not there often in the fall. |
Re: Which Battery to Buy?
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Re: Which Battery to Buy?
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I've got a large fleet of vehicles and for some of them I've just gone to battery sharing since a number of them do not see any use in the winter and some like my dump truck only gets used a couple of times per year. Personally I go with Costco batteries for the majority of my vehicles, if they have the appropriate size. The wife's primary drivers always get top of the line batteries as does my daughter's car. I also replace those and my primary driver at about 5 years too. I tried for a number of years to school everyone on the proper care of the FRC batteries to maximize the lifespan. Yet despite the fact that we have the batteries numbered people just grab a random battery, "because we are only testing". They then proceed to drain it completely and often don't put it on the charger. Just last week they were doing some testing on last year's robot which has been retrofitted with this year's control system. They were complaining that it was acting funny. I walked over and knew immediately by the sound the compressor was making that the battery was seriously low. I asked what the voltage on the dashboard was and with everything off it was showing 9.5 volts. I just had to walk away particularly when that dead battery was just set aside and not put on the charger. |
Re: Which Battery to Buy?
One thing we've drilled our students on is that once a battery comes off the robot, it goes directly on the charger unless no spot is available. We ensure this happens everywhere. One of the things we use as a very simple reason for this is "We do not want to run out of fully charged batteries in the Finals". They seem to understand this.
Now to finish getting them to all understand not to pull on the wires to disconnect them or lift batteries by them. |
Re: Which Battery to Buy?
[quote=cgmv123;1434755]I wouldn't call the Battery Beak "very inaccurate". Of course the CBA is a better test, but the Battery Beak is accurate enough for its purpose, which is to quickly determine the state of batteries at competition./QUOTE]
It works some of the time. I may of accidentally chose poor words. But to prove my point, while testing we have nothing but "good" batteries according to the beak and a few "fairs". Some of the "fairs" actually tested twice as well as the "good" batteries. Some of the "good" batteries that tested great on the beak lasted for four minutes on the CBA and absolutely tanked which is a disaster in a competition. All I'm saying is don't put 100% faith in the beak because you never know if it is actually good or not. |
Re: Which Battery to Buy?
http://www.westmountainradio.com/cba.php
We have the CBA III, the IV, and the CBA amplifier. Quite expensive but great testing in a fairly short time. |
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