Lucky for us it didn’t cost us a match during Week 1, however we had brownouts from the same KOP battery everyone else is referring to, in a match.
We will only ever use MK batteries and I will continue to post this in every battery thread. We donate our KOP batteries to other teams because they aren’t MK Batteries. We bought 8 new batteries in Feb from them for $34 each (that includes TX battery tax and shipping). Call them and let them know you are an FRC team to get the discounted price. Phone: 800-372-9253
They will work with you to get things shipped quickly or shipped to hotels/venues, etc.
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Have you tried removing the battery cables from a new battery, and then cleaning the contact areas (at least scrub them with a wire brush) and reassembling and retesting?
we have not but I am fairly certain that that is not the case because people have also been having problems with their KOP batteries
If you are looking for new batteries, my team has been satisfied over and over again from 12V Duracells. They are great batteries and they are not too hard to find. We usually buy ours from Batteries+Bulbs.
Yea those are the best batteries that we have found and used. We also think that you can only buy them from batteries and bulbs
Just bought some of those Batteries from Batteries+Bulbs. Looking forward to trying them out tomorrow. We’ve been having some battery troubles lately, where a seemingly charged battery suddenly drops to 7v and browns out.
Just tested my team’s. It’s worse than any other battery we have, and we have some old-ish batteries lying around.
Out of curiosity, does anyone have SPS batteries that were purchased from them that they can compare to the KOP battery? I wonder if they decided to donate some of their batteries that didn’t quite pass quality control or if they all are like this.
Edit:
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what model do you get?
This is what I got. I have them charging right now.
https://www.batteriesplus.com/battery/sla-sealed-lead-acid/12/slaa12=18nb
Lol I never thought to test our new battery, and I confirmed it is the worst of all of our batteries…even worse than some that are 3 years old.
We will only ever use MK batteries and I will continue to post this in every battery thread. We donate our KOP batteries to other teams because they aren’t MK Batteries. We bought 8 new batteries in Feb from them for $34 each (that includes TX battery tax and shipping). Call them and let them know you are an FRC team to get the discounted price. Phone: 800-372-9253
Quoting Allen because this is what every team should be doing. We purchased 8 this year as well from MK directly. 5 minutes on the phone and the customer rep was super nice. They shipped from Chicago and a few days later we had 8 brand new $34 dollar a piece (free shipping and they take your tax exempt form) batteries on my doorstep.
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Gonna chime in here. Our kop battery (SPS brand) performed the worst on our battery tests out of 14 batteries from 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. An interesting side note: The mean weight of 12 of the 13 batteries that aren’t from the 2019 kop (the 13th battery was not available for weighing) is 13 lbs with a standard deviation of 0.37 lbs. Our kop battery weighs 11.4 lbs. Not sure if this is significant, but I found it interesting.
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Our KOP battery was bad as well. We recycled it.
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Following up on Firecrafty, Here is a screenshot of our battery testing results:
(Vertical axis is Volts, Horizontal axis is Minutes)
2019 Interstate batteries don’t show well. Did something change in their manufacturing?
Interesting that 2018s show very well.
Test is approximately a 1C discharge test.
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This confirms our anecdotal observations from Week 1.
We had 5 teams at a Week 1 tournament and were using a shared battery charging station. Brown out problem kept biting different teams in the group. Made everyone pick 2 batteries and rotate and were able to find the bad batteries. They were all 2019 batteries. Also had one team with loose connector for the on/off switch. Once we fixed that problem all of our brownout problems cleared up where roborio would reset because of low voltage with a battery starting at 13+v. We are going to look at the batteries this weekend. Definitely a problem with 2019 KOP batteries.
Are the batteries AM sells ok?
AM sells the aforementioned poorly-performing Interstate batteries. Our experience was not great.
It seems likely that there is at least some level of poor performance coming out of a significant percent of ‘new’ batteries, both in the kit and ones recently purchased. In a way, it’s sort of a relief; we thought we were the only ones. Misery does love company.
I’m curious if there’s anyone in FRC’dom that has some industry insider knowledge of who is manufacturing these batteries. I have the strong suspicion that there are far fewer OEMs then there are brands, but I have no real evidence to back that up. A better idea of who the OEMs are and who they supply would really help identify which brands, lots or manufacturer date codes are problematic, if indeed the problem is even isolated to a single manufacturer.
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