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-   -   Which Battery to Buy? (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=130674)

adciv 28-01-2015 06:11

Re: Which Battery to Buy?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by waialua359 (Post 1434986)
This was during charging.
We would come the next day and the whole place would stink up.

You might want to check your charger out. Cell swelling is one sign of overcharging, although it is not unique to it.

protoserge 28-01-2015 06:48

Re: Which Battery to Buy?
 
Counterfeits are always possible.

MrForbes 28-01-2015 08:42

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.

philso 28-01-2015 13:03

Re: Which Battery to Buy?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by waialua359 (Post 1435083)
Our batteries havent been abused at all. Since we started doing FRC, we have charged them in the same way and fashion. We never experienced any battery issues (other than losing capacity) until this year with our 2012 Enersys stock throughtout the past several months. Earlier this week, we just decided to dispose of them all to prevent more of them having similar symptoms. We normally used the MK ones over the years, but in 2012 went with Enersys instead.
Strange.:confused:

Strange indeed. Having met your team, I would expect that they are not doing wild and crazy things. You may have had a bad batch. It happens to even the best manufacturers. Once they swell, they can leak acid so if you have had several go bad, it is best to dispose of them all.

Quote:

Originally Posted by stinglikeabee (Post 1435092)
Counterfeits are always possible.

That is also a possibility. We've been victims of counterfeit parts here at work several times.

Mr V 28-01-2015 14:19

Re: Which Battery to Buy?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by MrForbes (Post 1435114)
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.

Me too.

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.

adciv 28-01-2015 15:20

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.

thehotsauceman 28-01-2015 17:48

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.

thehotsauceman 28-01-2015 17:52

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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