Optimate 6

[Bala]

I know there has been a few posts about the Optimate charger and PN junction is a fan, I just need some confirmation on specifics.

I work in the workshop for a large-ish trucking company. We have in excess of 100 trucks, with most set up as B Doubles, with refrigerated vans.One model prime mover has 4 x N70 size batteries in parallel @ 12v and the other has 2 x N150 size in series @ 24V. All the vans have a single N70 Size and we have a lot of other plant and equipment, so we have a lot of batteries.

Currently we have a single charger to charge and test them to see if they can be returned to service but they are set up in parallel to charge so there may be a dead one with a good one etc and the snap on charger simply charges to a set point and turns off.

I have mention that this is a poor charge and test procedure but have never pushed the point. I have now been there long enough and have enough credibility that I would like to push for change.

So we have a mix of batteries as small as 220cca but most are SSB Calcium calcium in N70 size @ 760cca and N150 size @ 1150cca.

So I just want to confirm, is the optimate 6 big enough to do the 1150cca ones and

Is it just connect and forget until it tells you its finished, ( no settings to change etc)

Cheers

[Sunking]

Bala a N70 battery is a 100 to 120 AH battery and N90 even larger. You want to charge them with a 6 amp charger? Multiple batteries in parallel? Good luck with that.

Look there is a lot of misinformation on Battery Desulfators, most of it made up. If you look at reviews and claims might make you think there is magic going on when in fact is not the case. Read most of them and they say it took weeks or a month. You can do the exact same thing with a EQ charge for a week or month.

Most including Optimate Claim to use high voltage pulses which is pure fantasy and impossible. Batteries have Internal Resistance and Impedance. If you have a battery with 760 CCA is telling you the battery Internal Resistance is .007 Ohms. I do not know what the Impedance is other then I can say without a doubt it is lower than the Internal Resistance because every batteries Impedance is less than resistance.

So when you here a manufacture say they are pulsing at say 50 volts on a 12 volt battery is full of chit and flat out lying in your face. How do you know this. Simple to raise the voltage from 12 to 50 volts would require a current in that pulse of 5428 amps. Even a mere 1 volt pulse would be a extreme exaggeration as that would require 140 amps.

So what are these Desulfating Chargers really doing. Over charging the crap out of your batteries with a EQ voltage just like every charger out there can do.

I can tell you exactly how Battery Storage Facilities work and what they use. They use very heavy duty 12 volt Float Chargers capable of several hundred amps. Al the batteries are Float Charged to 13.6 volts.

If you look into IEEE and the battery manufactures they both say Desulfators do no harm. That is all they can come upo with. They will not say they do what they claim as no one has shown any documented proof that they do anything different than conventional EQ voltage.

[Bala]

Just to clarify,

One model truck runs batteries in parallel.

When batteries are getting charged on the the bench 2 or 3 will be paralleled,

I want to get away from them bench charging batteries in parallel, just have 2 or 3 single chargers so each battery gets its own charger and properly charged then tested.

The optimate 6 says it can do up to 240ah which seemed a little small.

So it would be better to just go with 20amp multistage stage chargers?

[Sunking]

Just to clarify,

One model truck runs batteries in parallel.

When batteries are getting charged on the the bench 2 or 3 will be paralleled,

I want to get away from them bench charging batteries in parallel, just have 2 or 3 single chargers so each battery gets its own charger and properly charged then tested.

The Optimate 6 says it can do up to 240ah which seemed a little small.

So it would be better to just go with 20amp multistage stage chargers?

Bala quit reading what the manufacture says it can do. Real simple math. Hours = Amp Hours / Amps x 1.2

The N70 Truck battery is an equivilent 100 to 120 AH battery depending on which manufacture you use.. N-90 re larger. So if you have single dead N70 battery charged at 6 amps 100 AH / 6 Amps x 1.2 = 20 hours) 2 batteries will take 2 days or more. A N90 two days for a single battery.

Is that what you had in mind?

Commercial shops use commercial equipment. Truck batteries are heavy duty and need charged very fast.

[Bala]

Still a bit of confusion on what I want,

this is not for charging batteries in trucks or any other unit.

Trucks and other units will get new batteries and sent on their way, all batteries less than 2 years old get charged and tested to see if they are scrap or can be used again.

it is for bench charging of single batteries, time frame is not an issue but for practical purposes a 12hr turn around would be best.

Largest single battery would be approx 200ah.

[Sunking]

Bala I understand what your objective is and I understand SLI Truck Batteries. You are looking for a Analyzer, which encompasses a few things. I wished I could find a link for Trojan's Battery analyzer the equip dealers with to test and restore batteries. Lester makes it for Trojan, and you can buy the bits and pieces of the Analyzer from Lester, just not in a unit custom made.

But it is really simple as it is basically a 50/75 amp charger, 50/75 amp Load Box for capacity testing, Ri, and a few other parameters. It is what dealers use to test batteries for warranty claims and Rejuvenation. If the battery can be restored it will do it, or tell you to move on.

The very first thing it does is a charge cycle at just a few amps to read the battery Internal Resistance, if in acceptable ranges are verified, it ramps up charge current to 50 or 75 amps depending on the battery size. 75 amps on a 200 AH and larger, 50 amps otherwise. It charges to 16 volts on a 12 volt battery. A mother of an EQ charge to rejuvenate the battery and restore capacity. Once charged the battery is rested for 30 minutes, then a Load Test is done at 50 or 75 amps for two minutes. The analyzer is them measuring Internal Resistance AC Impedance for PASS/FAIL, and monitoring voltage sag to stay above 11.5 volts under load. If all that passes, it discharges the battery at 50 to 75 amps until completely discharged to measure capacity. Then a nice quick 50/75 amp charge to 14.4 volts and ready to go if all the test pass.

You basically want to know Internal Resistance as that determines CCA, Internal Resistance also determines Voltage Sag and determined to be good or not. Last is capacity. To pass everything has to be within 80% of spec, capacity Ri, and AC Impedance, The key to restoration of a SLI battery is a monster of an EQ charge at high charge rates and higher voltage. Initially large current to recombine soft sulfate crystals quickly back into solution, followed by a nice gassing sizzle at 16 volts to recombine the harder crystals. Once you run the test, you know to either trash it or put up on the used battery rack guaranteed to work.

Sound like you need a Analyzer and a good heavy duty charger. Lots of Analyzers out there and for the money the Lester Discharge/Analyzer will do the trick. It will do everything I just said except charge. Will give you a print out of everything you want to know. Works on a 75 amp load box. built in with Laptop interface. To compliment it a good heavy duty 50 to 100 amp charger. The fast charging and deep fast discharge is what wakes the battery up if it can be woke up. Normally you would not want to do that, but if the battery is on its way out no harm trying.

Ever see a mechanic short out a battery on purpose. Wanna know where he got that. He is trying to wake the battery up with a hell of a jolt of current. If he starts to get good fire, he knows it can be charged up. If it fizzels to sparks either trashed or deeply discharged.

[Bala]

Yes now where on the same page, and yes that unit would be good.

problem is it has to be fairly simple, I often find batteries on charge that are so hot hey are a bomb waiting to go off.

I know bigger is better but I have a 16A Projecta (PC1600) that does a 16V charge. After absorb it will do 2A up to 16V then hold at 30minutes or 12hr time out.

There is a 21amp model. These could be put on for each battery for 24hrs,

That would have to be better than the way it is done now with the existing charger, which is to basically to about 14.5 then off.

At the moment all that is used to determine god or bad is a digital tester that I assume measures IR. if a battery has just come off charge it can test ok but fail when put into service.

We have a big old load tester and I like to use that then the digital tester, but I dont do general battery testing.

So thanks you have answered my question and given me some more info.

I doubt I will end up with the ultimate in charging and testing bit i think i should be able to put in place a much better system than we have now.

[Sunking]

Y if a battery has just come off charge it can test ok but fail when put into service.

What do call a TEST?

What you just described is extremely common. I can take it, charge it, the charger will think it was charged. Voltage will look good until you hit it. There are 2 Test you really want to know because it tells you exactly what you want to know.

1. Load Test. On a charged battery apply a 50 amp load and observe voltage for 15 to 30 seconds. Voltage should stay above 11 volts, it can take a load.
2. Capacity Test. exactly like it sounds. Charge the battery up, and discharge to 10.5 volts and measure the Amp Hour capacity.

So if you have say a 100 AH battery and it passes Test 1, and measured 89 AH on Test 2. What do you have? A good used battery you know will work. Use any charger you want. The Optimate is a good charger, but at the end of the day is a 6-Amp charger with some smarts built in. All good battery chargers do that.

My point is from what you have said is you are looking more for some Analyzer. There are some good Analyzers out there very simple to use. All do th esame thing. Perform a Load Test, and from that will tell you battery Ri, aprox CCA, and AC Impedance. Just no capacity test.

[Bala]

I am saying the current method used for testing is flawed,

I will look at an auto Analyzer but for the time being I will try and implement something with what we have.

I may not have given the Snapon charger we have enough credit, it looks like it has a manual mode so I may be able to get it to do what we need. It will do 60A @ 12V, but I cant find any manual or charge rates online. I will look on the machine and see the dealer this week.

And we have the old style load tester and the newer digital tester. What i have done previously is charge, let sit, old style load test and let sit then digital test.

I would like to give our apprentices some idea of what is needed to properly charge and test a battery, rather than just buy more automated gear.

It is quite scary what "tradesman" dont know.

[PNjunction]

Bala - your N70 and N150 are fine.

Although they may not have a 20hr rating, they are actually around 85ah and 155ah respectively.

In fact, if your battery has an RC rating, multiply the RC * 0.6 to get an approximation. Would I use the Optimate 6 to repetetively charge these from a deep-discharge? Heck no. But doing a checkup from one that was taken from normal service, or perhaps bulk-charged by something else and stopped before completion and swapped for testing with the Optimate - by all means.

With all due respect to Sunking, he does not own an Optimate, and is making a generalization with the best of intentions from all the snake-oil salesman out there.

For a battery which has become so severely discharged that it won't accept a normal charge from a standard charger merely because the SOFT sulphate coating is so thick, (like you overdischarged and left it that way overnight or maybe a day or so) the Optimate, like some others, will "burp" the over discharged battery with high-voltage/limited pulse time just to get the voltage back to a level that a normal charge can take over.

This SOFT SULFATION can be reversed. If you leave it too long to HARDEN, that's when the smarts of an Optimate will tell you that you are wasting your time. They KNOW that sulfation, hard sulfation, has secondary damaging effects even IF you could remove the hard stuff. Frequently, it will error-out, and sometimes show a bad-cell right off the bat. You're done, Jim.

YES, it does do 20v *limited* quick pulses when necessary (like a badly discharged batery my Fluke 87v can capture it) but only long enough to allow for a normal charge to begin. In fact, if left connected to vehicle circuitry, the impedance of the vehicle connections naturally dampens this to about 16v - the charger does not change it - the environment does.

Of course a lot of hand-waving is made about this from vehicle forums who like to predict, but won't actually OWN AND TEST, but the actual PULSEWIDTH is so small that no harm is done if the batt is left in the vehicle. In fact, that is why Optimate recommends that for full effect with a battery that doesn't recover in-vehicle, is to pull it out on the bench and do it again for full effect. If that doesn't work - again - they tell you you are done, at least from a consumer standpoint.

Thing is, reputable companies like Tecmate-Optimate and Battery-Minder have plenty of instructions in their manuals telling you to stop wasting your time if the unit responds with errors after perhaps a second attempt. They do NOT proclaim themselves to be revivers of dumpster-diving trash.

Yes, it is a hands-off setup. BUT you will want to just become comfortable with what the LED's mean. Most importantly, when the upper right green led is flashing, don't stop! It is now doing a 12-hour long-term voltage retention test to make sure it hasn't been fooled by the initial short-term 1-hour retention test.

An Optimate 6 would be fine for top-off, testing, and maintenance / recovery of the N70 and N150. Would I do *daily* or repetetive normal-discharge with only a 5-amp charger on these large batts - no of course.

Heck, you could even just buy it for yourself to prove a point. Here's my prediction: the higher ups will want you to buy more for a bigger test station. If that happens, get away from the forum, and talk to them for that kind of larger setup.

[PNjunction]

Quick followup:

Desulphation of abused / neglected batteries is not my major attraction to the Optimate.

The pre / post testing is, along with their charge algo which differs from just a simplistic CC/CV. Maintenance is fine, but I use solar for that anyway.

However, a regular test with the Optimate can help me spot trends / problems much quicker from a consumer standpoint. In fact, they even mention that despite how proud they are of their engineering, if in doubt, seek a professional test setup. Statements like that make me trust them just that much more.

Hint: and by professional, to me this doesn't mean dropping it on the counter of the nearest auto-parts store kid who takes it into the backroom where you can't see that he's placed it on a $20 resistive load.

So far it hasn't let me down. Aside from your application, when friends call me to check out their solar system hacks, the first thing I do is PROVE that their battery they got from retail is either ok or starting off on the wrong foot with a dud. Saves me a LOT of time.

[Bala]

It may be an option to use the big charger to bulk them then put them on an optimate for final charge and test as you say.

A scenario recently is our newest fridge vans have motion sensing lights inside. trouble is if the fridge motor is not running ( carting dry cargo) then the light is getting activated by the movement of the cargo and we have flat batteries that are brand new.

biggest problem is I am the only one there who has any clue about properly charging and testing batteries.

It is just a bit annoying as we are fitting batteries back into units that are not great and throwing away ones that are good.

[PNjunction]

Must be frustrating - from this distance I kind of think that viibration-robust calcium-calcium commercial starter batteries are suddenly being put into a deep discharge application. You might get a year or so out of them tops. Changing to a deep cycle would at least help if you can't get a handle on the parasitic load from lighting.

To be sure, the Optimate would be used for testing on single batteries here, not those massively parallel banks in the fleet.

It might be time for "social engineering". Putting the results from a Midtronics or other professional tester into a manager's face who doesn't know about batteries in the first place might be a tough sell, so you might have to lead by example.

Instead of a complicated (to them) readout that they don't understand, how about "Hey mate, check out what I've got going on in the corner near my van - that's a new battery and already the led is totally RED telling me it is acting like it is 4 years old!"

At the very least, your own batteries at home and in your solar setup will benefit, or simply give you a baseline to keep track of.

[Bala]

The motion sensing light in the vans is a classic example of designers coming up with a bright idea that fails in practice.

For the moment I will look at out existing snap on charger to see what it can really do, it appears have an option for manual control so I may be able to get it to do a good absorb type charger. We have what is similar to a Durst BT-2003F load tester to after charge I can load them with that and then run the SSB DBT-4000 on them. I was doing this a while ago but I was taken off battery testing. Our first year apprentices get battery testing duties but have no real idea what they are doing.

The SSB tester is all that is used at the moment but it has failings. As most batteries tested in the trucks have just come off charge it will say a battery is ok when I know they are not.

[Sunking]

Bala if you need a meter to tell you if the health of a battery, they do exist. Lot;'s of them. Midtronics is one, But it does not have to be complicated. Two simple test a high school student can run, and trained in 2 minutes.

Load Test and Impedance. Additionally if the meter reads Impedance should read Internal Resistance.

First do the Load Test, it either Passes or Fails, takes 10 seconds. If the Load test pass, read the Impedance and Internal Resistance.

The Impedance and Resistance tell the story. If they are within spec tolerance (Low Enough) the battery is good plain and simple.

Example if the battery is spec at 500 amps CCA, is telling you the battery Internal Resistance @ 32 degrees F is (12.6 - 7.2 volts) / 500 Amps = .0108 Ohms or 10 milli-ohms. So at room temps should be a bit lower. Impedance due to the battery physics will be a bit lower than Resistance. Make a simple table using CCA for 300, 400, 500........

No to reverse or to save a battery there is only one possible way to do it. Batteries are a knife edge. On one side is where 95% live is on the Sulfate side (low voltage). The other side is Corrosion.(high voltage). Corrosion damage cannot be reversed, Sulfate can be reversed if the crystals have not hardened off. So how do you reverse or Save a sulfated battery? Easy with corrosion or a good controlled Over Charge with high current and high voltage. Read Optimate 6 specs, that is exactly how they do it but without high current using a 16 volt EQ charge. They say they use a Pulse which only means it is a PWM voltage regulator or more closely resembles DC motor speed controller.

There are lots of 5-Stage Chargers on the market, Optimate makes a very small 5 amp model, great for a Boat or Truck being stored or infrequently used. Having said all they does not sound like you need a Charger, you need a Analyzer with a Load Test and Impedance.