Battery Warning

Hey, this is a notice to everyone. I don’t know if it is all of the kit of parts(KOP) batteries or just ours. So I am part of Team 2619 The Charge, This past worlds we did a seminar in Detroit about our way of testing batteries and stuff like that. Then this year when we went to test our batteries we found that the KOP battery was worse than a 5-year-old battery. The battery was an SRS brand battery. We have not used any of this brand of batteries before. We also did compare it to a five-year-old battery. So this is just an FYI to check your KOP battery. If there is interest I might post the info about our testing and stuff like that.

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It’d probably be good to post more specifics about the tests you performed and their results.

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I have experienced this, under load the batteries have little to no voltage, not to mention the fact that one of the ones we got just this year started leaking for no reason

We labeled the 2019 KOP battery while it was still in the box, and have found that it is one of the worst batteries we currently have on hand (1/2 of our batteries are from 2014). Can’t even support our compressor to fully charge our tanks one single time.

After our first competition is over this weekend, I’m going to look into getting it replaced by FIRST/whomstever. It will not see the field this weekend.

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We have observed rapid brown-outs in matches of new batteries from the KoP and AndyMark this year.

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How should we test the batteries? Through the battery beak?

Team 2619 has a pretty detailed report on their website about how they test their batteries.

That said, though not as thorough a testing method, a Battery Beak can be used to compare relative battery performance (in most cases) by checking batteries internal resistance (or “Rint”) values at the bottom of the Battery Beak display. Lower numbers are better, with the average “good” battery generally falling in the 0.012 Ohms - 0.018 Ohms range. In my experience, you should avoid using anything over 0.025 Ohms in a competitive match.

Note that Lead-Acid batteries loose capacity over time when stored at room temperature (as much as 10%-30% every 6 months), so it shouldn’t be surprising if you have older batteries that are no longer good.

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I will get them from our mentor I just don’t have them right now

that is not fun

what brand was it also where are you going to get a replacement from

there are many ways if you look at the post below you then you can find the way that we test our batteries

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I forgot to ask everyone who has had issues to if you can put the battery brand

Don’t know.
Don’t know.

Our 3 new batteries from this year tested well but one from 2018 did get voted off the island after testing. Even a 2010 battery in our practice cart did better. The slacker was a Yuasa branded battery. So is the 2010 battery.

We had the same issue with our KoP battery this year as well. We ended up just using it as one of our pre-match batteries to charge our ballasts.

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We observed the same thing. Practicing with the robot, it started browning out a lot, and even with just the compressor running, was getting very low. Testing on the battery beak showed it as 9V under load. We later identified it was the 2019 KOP battery, which was pretty surprising.

We have a bad new battery. I can’t confirm right now if it’s the KOP one, but our new ones are all either Andymark or KOP. I believe they’re all from Interstate Batteries.

This table shows our battery rankings, based on a combination of internal resistance, short-term/high-load, and long-term/low-load tests.

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We constantly browned in one of our matches and it appears that it was due to a black battery from the 2019 KoP.

Yes we have found this here at 6032 thankfully before build season and two of our batteries died and we had to replace them. Thanks for insuring battery maintenance for other teams!

Your best route is to get an interstate FRC battery from Vex