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Originally Posted by kiettyyyy
Hey,
We have been having some issues with dead batteries that were being deep discharged.
What are your recommendations for a battery charger that can give us an accurate green led when the battery is fully charged and also have the ability to repair potentially bad batteries?
Thanks
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The batteries we use have a very finite life. Under normal conditions this is about 400 charge/discharge cycles. Most teams do not use the batteries in normal conditions. A robot runs very high discharge rates and rapid charging repeatedly for several days during competitions. Sulphation is not as big a problem with gelcells as with standard lead acid batteries but it does occur. I don't think that is the case with your batteries. If you drain a battery in one match consider that the life of the battery has been cut in half. We have been finding that several batteries we use, are starting to deteriorate on a cell by cell basis. We test the suspect batteries using a Mountain Radio computerized battery charger. It shows that one cell (2volts) may have significantly less capacity than the other cells in the battery. I suspect that the heavy use has damaged plate connections within the cell. Some of the batteries show about a 4 amp hour rating on one or two cells while the rest of the cells remain near the 18 amp hour capacity. We have had one new battery, out of the box, show this problem. If you run you batteries for a few minutes and then check the voltage and the reading is a multiple of 2 volts below 12 volts (with no load) suspect a bad cell and not the battery as a whole.
There is no reasonably priced charger that will fix the sulphation problem and nothing can fix the defective cell problem.