Our FRC battery beak is reading bad status for some batteries, how do we resolve this and how do we determine when a battery is bad and should be replaced with the battery beak?
As long as there is nothing wrong with the wires or connectors, there isn’t really much you can do to fix a battery. They just wear out over time. My team always replaces our batteries that are more then two years old.
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Not much to be done on the beak side. Batteries just wear down and degrade over time. One of our 2020 batteries had been showing 60% by the end of its life and would barely sustain charge.
Generally the battery will go down before the beak, just make sure to label each batteries year. As the years go by, test the batteries more, at some point just dont bother checking and get them recycled (I have observed that tends to be 3-5 years), or rotate them to practice/programming batteries.
Once “bad” there isn’t really anything<1> you can do to make the battery better. However, depending on how bad, “bad” is, it may (or may not) still be useful to your team.
It is important to regularly<2> test your batteries. We use the CBA V - Computerized Battery Analyzer - West Mountain Radio tester, but many teams use the “Battery Beak”.
Once tested we strictly segregate our “Comp” batteries from our “Outreach” (/Practice/Programming) batteries. When a Comp battery is no longer testing high enough it gets demoted to being an Outreach battery, and when those are too low they get recycled.
Because of this our Comp batteries generally last several years (as they get only about a dozen or so uses per year), and then a few years more as Outreach batteries.
<1> Some battery chargers claim to rejuvenate batteries. We have not had any success with this.
<2> For example, Comp batteries in advance of each competition so you know your batteries from best to worst.
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For the price, I’m really happy with the SkyRC BD250 battery load tester. It’s a good unit that works well.
This is critical though. Make sure your connectors are tight! If you can rotate the wires around the bolt fixing them to the battery by hand, they’re too loose. This can affect the impedance reading you get from the battery beak (and the actual performance of the battery).
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