CCTV picked up someone taking a battery of the drive this morning ?

[motorbiking]

the ones that are worth money are the 18650s in laptops. each cell is worth 3-5 quid on ebay. sometimes you get 8 or 9 good quality japanese cells in each pack.

 

[cjard]

Interesting - And co incidentally my part time job veg delivery van - ran the battery down to nothing the other day - first the radio then the windows, then the indicators and eventually the backlit display all went, and then the fly by wire throttle. So, would you guys say I well and truly F****d the battery

If you catch them quickly, charge them back up with a charger that can deal with the situation (best trickle charged) then it will recover to be usable, but won't recover 100%. You'll probably find as it gets increasingly cold it gets increasingly lazy, to the point on one sub-zero day that you leave the lights on for 10 minutes doing a delivery, the durn thing won't go when you come back to it..

Mistake a lot of people make in charging them is doing it too quickly; less than 1 amp is best to recover them. Charging too quickly heats them up, distorting the plates and causing internal shorts that rob the capacity. At 1 amp, an 80 amp-hour van battery will take 80 hours to charge; hard to believe but your dead van battery might require 4+ days to recharge. If you do the old "I'll just jump it off this other battery/put this electric booster charger on to get it going then take it for an hour's drive" you'll either find one of 2 things - the alternator doesn't charge it at all, because the residual voltage in the battery is too low when you remove the jump leads, or it'll slam it with 70, 90, 100 amps, whatever it's rated for, and ruin it

 

[nauseous]

Anyone know if your 12v charger set on low charge, which i think is 2-3amps or thereabouts which may be too much, can you charge it on the 6v (motorbike) setting to act as a trickle charge, or doesn't it work like that?
It's an oldish 8amp charger btw.

 

[Mikefromlondon]

No it doesn't work like that, for 6volts its peak voltage would not go anywhere near what is required to trickle charge a 12v battery, normally trickle charge means any charger that limits it maximum peak voltage to 13.8V exact, so once your battery has full charge acquired , its terminal voltage would have reached 13.8v exactly, and therefore if your charger was set to maximum 13.8v then current from charger would automatically reduce since there is now no difference in the voltage between the fully charged battery and the maximum limit of the charger voltage. But yes even if your charger was slightly above 13.8V to say 14v, then full 8 amps may flow, as the charger will try to pump charge into the batteries to pull the battery voltage to 14volts, and the battery would no doubt get pulled to that voltage and cook, as it would now be overcharging. and again as the battery reaches 14volts, it would also be boiling, (gassing ) and so that is no good for battery as it would lose its electrolyte.

as long as your charger limits its maximum voltage to 13.8v and a fully charged battery would then draw only a trickle charge of just a few tens of mili amps like say 50 - 100mA

one way to trickle charge your battery is to lower its output voltage, but this can be difficult since we can never predict mains line voltage as it can vary, consequently with varying mains supply, its output would also vary a bit, so a simple charger without a regulated voltage will tend to go up or down even if you were to use a series resistor to lower the current to trickle amount.

I found that a bench power supply (variable) with variable voltage selector and with two seperate current and voltage meters makes a better charger, you could see what the current is flowing through the battery and what is the charger output voltage and battery voltage with current limiter adjustments too. You can but these for about 30 qyuid.

 

[nauseous]

Ok thanks. Excuse my limited knowledge on this matter. It was just that I've bought a new 12v battery in anticipation for the death of my light vans current decrepit old battery that barely got me through last winter. I'm gonna (well planning) look after this one and charge it monthly on the drive as it probably wont get used too much this winter. Shall just stick it on low charge overnight, no idea what miliamp it will be charging at as all it states/shows is a flickering needle and 2 4 6 8 amp pointers on a graph. Label on back just says 6/12v output.

 

[Seafarer1966]

Why would someone take a car battery left on a drive - do they have some sort of scrap value.

It was rubbish from my perspective, but wasn't left out as such.

Wire battery up to the mains. Then keep watch out for a gentleman in a trilby hat with a feather in it/ permanent caravan dweller/ passionate tarmac layer/ owner of brand spanking new four by four/ serial tax and NI avoider.........and flick the switch.

"Bejaysus, Holy Farder an' de twelve Apostles oi just got a shock off dat ting so I did!"

 

[Seafarer1966]

Good policy on buying a new battery before the existing one gives up the ghost Wrangler. I bought my car four years ago and the battery was the one that was in it when I got the car.
This time of year is silly season for alternators and batteries packing up. I keep telling the squaw not to use the heated front and rear windscreens as it hammers the alternator. Not that she listens to me. I got a new battery in the summer. I note that a few of the online motor spares retailers put the price of batteries and alternators up in winter time.

I'd signed up with www.eurocarparts.com who are not a bad car parts retailer. They have a branch not far from where I live which is a bonus (they do deliver also). If you sign up with your email address they send you voucher codes and have 'today only' or weekend sales. I got 30% off the price of a Duracell 60 amp 12 volt battery with five years guarantee which I didn't think was a bad deal.

 

[motorbiking]

That is one slightly annoying thing with modern chargers.. They all seem to need to be "set" from power on. I'd like to have my charger for the motorhome on a timer switch so that it comes on say 15 mins a day to top the motorhome up. The Leisure battery is easy enough to top up this way, but the van and home part are on separate isolation switches.

I guess I could run a 12v cable via the 12v lighting circuit to the cigar lighter port.