Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Battery Maintenance: Desulfation

By Allen Strong

Battery sulfation is the leading cause of major failures in the industrial use of batteries. It doesn't only affect industries, but anything that uses lead acid batteries as well, such as your car. If you've experienced struggling in your battery when it comes to a simple process as starting the engine, your car batteries might be victims of sulfation.

So what exactly is sulfation? When the lead plates suspended in an electrolyte solution inside a battery reacts with the sulfuric acid in the solution, it combines to form a compound called lead sulfate. This greatly affects the efficiency of the battery to generate enough current by covering the plates and reducing the area of contact it has with the solution.

If you haven't used your car for a while or you just bought batteries that were stored for a long time in the store without being used, it's very likely that the cells in these batteries have become desulfated. It's pretty easy to tell whether this has happened. If your car is struggling to start up with a brand new or rarely used battery, nine times out of ten, it's sulfated already.

The most common way of preventing sulfation in batteries, especially in lead acid cells, is to regularly discharge their voltage. Even once a month could make a big difference. You're going to want to make sure that your cells remain active as this considerably reduces the chances of sulfation from occurring.

Lead acid batteries can be dampened and topped with distilled water to keep them from sulfating even in extended periods of time. This slows down the reaction time it takes to form lead sulfate and may just save your batteries from dying early on. There are also industrial battery desulfators available in the market these days that can reverse the chemical reaction and virtually fix you batteries. But you have to keep in mind that these devices can only save your cells so much. There are levels of damage that no amount of desulfation cannot fix and this is what you want to prevent from happening.

So there you have it. The best thing to maintain your battery life is to make sure that you keep it active. The usual case is that your batteries don't die, their owners are killing them.

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