I park my CJ in one of those 10'x20' grey plastic garages, was out wheeling last sunday, and obviously I forgot to turn off lights, battery so dead not even a click, stuck camper battery in and on come lights. So question is, had CJ for 1 1/2 years, battery of unknown age, one of those ones with green lights, ( no green there today ), is it worth trying to charge it or is it shot? I've had dead batteries before, but not ones that dead, 7 days of headlights on, so I don't know if a non deap cycle battery can come back from that.

Greg did pass the time by typing:You can but try. Be aware that if you use a battery charger itmay tripp several times till the battery starts taking a charge.

The stuff I was building the chargers for didn't have the luxury of getting the last gasp out of a battery - we had minimum backup life wehad to guarentee. Most of mine would try a rescue then run a controlled discharge to measure capacity followed by a leakage run. It the controller reported failure of either one it notified a controlcenter and a replacement was scheduled. After several years of messing with this stuff we wound up using very high current spikes followed by a cooling period for the initial recharge. The protocol varied with the battery, but it was something like 100 msec at 10x rated charge current using a 5% duty cycle. Fun stuff - got to spray batteries all over a test cell . Made me very cautious around charging batteries.

Is my battery shot?

Feb 27, 2005 23 Replies

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Will Honea 21 years ago

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Peter D. 21 years ago

give me the date code from your bat & i will tell you how old it is or, take a look at this link & scroll down to question 4

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way, out of curiosity, let us know the agewarning: this does not work for all bats. it definitely works on johnsoncontrols branded bats(more than a dozen brands, depending on where they are sold, so chances aregood) but delco & possible others uses diffr scheme for their bats to see a list of johnson controls batteries follow this link

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out common vehicle mfr's out the door - what's left is johnson's ownbrands

btw. in case you don't know

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has been started & is maintained by johnson controls...

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JohnM 21 years ago

It might well come back, as long as it didn't freeze, but I think you'll find that it'll take a fairly serious charger to make it happen. When a battery sits dead for very long the plates change and become harder to put a charge into. Here's a link that explains it, to some degree..

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Read under the heading "Charge".

Good luck,

John

nds wrote:

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popeyeball 21 years ago

Rich, Good post. Steve

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