The importance of using GOOD batteries

[John_Koorn]

Hi All,

I wanted to recap on how important it is to use good batteries in your experiments. I think most people who are replicating and experimenting with the SSG Monopole Energizer spend more time on trying to get the machine to work properly than focussing on on the batteries they are using. This is why I think most people are not getting the results they should be getting.

It doesn't matter how good your machine is built or how well you wound your coil, matched the components or what your free spin time is IF you are not using good batteries! I have seen this over and over again on the bench - bad batteries = bad results, good batteries = good results!

So how do you know if you have a good battery or not? Here's a few tips:

1. Use only flooded lead acid batteries. Other battery types will work, but until you get good results with flooded LABs and fully understand how they work, what they like and don't like and what their charge and discharge curves look like don't try other battery types.
2. Size the battery to your setup, or more importantly, size your setup to your battery. This is something you will need to experiment with and get a feel for from experience. As a guide, the most basic bifilar SSG on a bike wheel rotor is good for a 3Ah motorcycle battery. The 8-filar bike wheel kit is good for a 13Ah lawn tractor battery. Anything bigger and you are looking at a very well built multi-coil system.
3. Get to know your battery. One of the first things you will want to do with a battery you haven't worked with is to develop a charge and discharge profile. There are tools on the market like the West Mountain Radio CBA, but you can also plot your own charts by manually recording voltage readings at regular intervals and plotting a chart in Excel. When discharging, you will want to know how healthy the battery is by load testing it. That is, load the battery at the C20 rate and calculate the Amp hours or Watt hours the battery can deliver. Repeated charge and load tests will give you a battery profile.
4. Never exceed the charge or discharge termination voltages. If you want to keep your battery, treat it nice. Search for the battery's specs and stick to them. As a guide, never discharge a starter battery below 12.2v or a true deep cycle below 10.5v. Conventional battery chargers or "quick" chargers will kill your battery by forcing current into them which causes heat which will warp the plates and shed the active material off the plates, eventually causing shorted cells.
5. Is that new battery really "new"? New batteries these days are getting worse and worse. They are designed for you to replace them every 3 years. The plates are thinner, they are not formed properly and the lead in them is of poor quality. Most batteries are already sulfated when you get them. The tip here is to run them through a few cycles until you start getting close to the rated capacity of the battery. Be especially cautious of dry charged batteries - my tests are showing that these usually need a lot of cycles to get them up to scratch.

Hope this helps...

John K.

[Tom C]

I could not agree more. Many people start out with crappy lead acid batteries and end up frustrated. I have seen sulfated batteries need 100 cycles or more to get the plates close to new, being very nice to them the whole time. Then and only then will you see gains, as the battery is where it all occurs.
Tom C

[Robert Darrah]

Hi John K. and Tom C.,

I remember in one post John said deep cycle batteries are the best. I see deep cycle batteries are available in the 12-15 ah range, but they are all SLABs. Could you give us your take on SLABs versus FLABs, and deep cycle versus starter batteries?

thanks,

Robert

[John_Koorn]

Hi Robert,

There are 2 types of SLABs - there's the "maintenance free" ones which are "sealed", which are flooded LABs but you can get to the cell caps and top up the electrolyte. These are OK. They come in both deep cycle and starter.

The other type of course is the gel-cell aka VRLA or AGM which are the ones to stay away from. Eventually these will dry out and I've not had a lot of success with bringing them back. Generally once they dry out the positive plate dries out and cracks and crumbles. Bad batteries, designed so you buy another one in 2-3 years.

Deep cycle or starter depends on what you want to use them for. If you want to use the batteries to power an inverter, which most people do then you need a true deep cycle battery. For load testing an SSG down to 10.5v I would go for this type, but not sure how small the capacity is these days. You can use a starter battery, like a flooded motorcycle or lawn tractor battery as long as you don't discharge them under 12.2v. When we were testing the bike wheel kit at JB's shop we used a 13Ah NAPA lawn tractor battery and we were just taking 1 or 2 Ah out of it. I think one time we took 4 or 5Ah out of it which is fine.

Tom and I recently did some testing on some Yuasa 11Ah dry-charged motorcycle batteries. We think they had been sitting at the store for a couple years because once we filled them with the supplied acid we found out they would not fully charge and discharged pretty quickly as well. I think these will take at least 50 cycles to get to full capacity. I agreed with JB that these batteries are poorly formed at the factory and probably pretty sulfated by the time we got them. These are designed so that there is enough in them to start your motorcycle and then the alternator takes over to form them properly as you ride down the road for a few hundred miles. But the alternator will never de-sulfate them properly so the battery is half toasted even when you buy it.

Look around for good quality batteries, basically you get what you pay for. Ask the store to do a capacity check on the battery before you buy it. Steer clear of batteries going cheap on eBay, you don't know their history. Good new batteries are expensive and if you are buying them and want them to last a lifetime do your research before parting with the hard earned coin

John K.

[kingstingtin]

Thank you very much for the information. You have helped me a lot, had talked about the specific parameters that determine the capacity of the secondary battery. Many do not have the ability to use these wire diameter, the size of the magnets and the core material. Maybe it affects the operation of the device. On what, you need to choose a secondary battery. In my town, I can buy only two germitichnyh gelivyh battery: 7 Ah and 1.2 Ah. You certainly know what settings should be. For example, the value of "h" pulse, the output current, the magnitude of induction, pulse repetition rate, and so on. If I had known all this, I would be much easier to properly configure the device.
I tried to charge the new battery. But instead of increasing the capacity I got it decrease. I found the cause of this, when the charging current is measured by means of an oscilloscope. He was twice the allowable C20.

[Robert Darrah]

Hi John K.,

Thanks for all the good information. It seems like more and more I say, "Of course it doesn't work. It's new." Yet it's still a blind spot because I never would have thought new batteries would take 50 cycles to get them going. That's just crap. Most new people would think the technology doesn't work and give up long before doing the 50 cycles.

The deep cycle SLABs I was looking at were all AGM so I haven't found any true deep cycle small amp hour batteries that are suitable, so I'll stick with the lawn and garden batteries for now. You're right in that people spend more and more time tweaking the machine to get the efficiency up, and yet may have big blind spots with things like lousy batteries. It's the not seeing the forest for the trees thing.

There are so many variables with just a simple ssg that can be changed, and when you're just learning you don't know which ones are worth experimenting with. You can spend hours and hours trying something and only get the efficiency up a couple of percent, whereas if you'd been tweaking something else the gains might have been much greater.

The possible experiments are endless. So it's difficult knowing sometimes how to prioritize improving the machine, what will yield good results versus what is basically a waste of time. That's why I like this info, because it focuses on an area where you get the most bang for your buck. Thanks for keeping us on track.

Robert

[John_Koorn]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the positive feedback. As long as people are prepared to listen, I'm happy to help.

If this tech was a college degree the first year should be learning about batteries because that is the most important part of it.

A lot of people come into this tech and expect overnight results and when they don't get them they say the technology doesn't work. I'll bet most people get car batteries from their buddy where the battery was drained and let sit in the back yard for years. They expect you to repair years of damage overnight and then complain that this tech doesn't work because the battery doesn't come back. Seriously...

Unfortunately it takes a lot of time to learn about batteries and how they behave. The circuits are a piece of cake, almost anyone who can hold the correct end of a soldering iron can build the machine. The trick is to spend hours and hours doing the load testing so you see the results.

After a while you'll say to your buddy who dropped off the batteries "no, you abused the battery too much, I'm not going to waste my time on it - take it to the recycling station instead".

A friend of mine dropped off a bunch of batteries last weekend. 1 car battery where his wife left the interior light on and 4 gel-cell motorcycle batteries. I called him up and told him I could fix the car battery but the motorcycle batteries were toast and I wasn't going to bother with them. The car battery came back to 80% capacity after one cycle on the RC-20A12 Rejuvenator and the gel-cells are door stops. I saved him $200 on a new car battery for a couple of $ on power and we both get a couple of good door stops. He pays me in home brewed beer

John K.

[fathershand]

John, thanks for sharing this information. I now realize why I've been getting terrible results on some batteries.
Thanks
Tony

[BEDINSSGUKRAINE]

I personally feel a need to get a list with good battery manufactures..........

[mrbeale]

John thanks for the post !

I tried googling flooded lead acid batteries but cant find exactly what that are?? Are they just starter batteries that can be topped up? How do you think my Sealed lead battery would go on a standard Bedini SSG 7.2 Amp Hour 12V Sealed Lead Acid Battery - Jaycar Electronics

[fathershand]

John, you said to ask the store to "capacity test" the battery before you buy it. How do they do that? I am looking to buy a new motorcycle battery, and they don't put the acid in them until you purchase it. The acid is sperate in the box with the battery.
Thanks
Tony

[John_Koorn]

John, you said to ask the store to "capacity test" the battery before you buy it. How do they do that? I am looking to buy a new motorcycle battery, and they don't put the acid in them until you purchase it. The acid is sperate in the box with the battery.
Thanks
Tony

Tony,

The capacity test can only be done with batteries with the acid already in them. If they are a good battery store they will have a decent quality battery capacity tester on hand, some can even you give you a printout of the test conditions and capacity. At a bare minimum they should have a hydrometer to test the specific gravity. Google what the specific gravity of a fully charged lead acid battery is.

All batteries should also have a manufactured date stamp on them, you may have to query the manufacturer's web site to get an explanation of the date format they use. Try and get a battery that hasn't been sitting in the store for too long, as they will self discharge and sulfate as soon as they leave the factory.

Be very wary of the dry charged motorcycle batteries that you have to add the acid to. I've seen some of these batteries that have been sitting in the store for a long time, even with no acid in them they will sulfate. They also appear to be poorly formed and may require 10 - 20 cycles to get them to the rated capacity.

Just do your research before you hand over the cash. It always helps to know more than the sales guy

John K.

[fathershand]

Thanks, John. I'll keep these things in mind while I look for the right store and battery.
Tony

[LesK]

This is an excellent thread. I have seen more people confused over the "Fluff" or surface charge and walk away.
My experience is that on the first charges with the SSG there is mostly just a surface charge. It may go well over 15 volts and level off, so I stop, let the battery rest a bit, and then discharge. At this point it would look as though the SSG performance is less than about 5% efficient as there is almost no real power in the battery. Then after several cycles Suddenly the battery will take forever to charge ( I believe this is where the plates are actually forming). Still making the SSG look extremely inefficient. this I call stage two. But the battery does begin to hold charge with a load. Then after a number of cycles everything begins to reverse. It begins to take a lot less time to charge and holds a charge for a much longer time. This is when I really begin to start seeing what my SSG is made of. I agree that this simple aspect has held many people back. It seems easy enough to understand now, but when new it really is a hard concept to grasp, I suppose it is because most are probably use to immediate gratification in our society these days.

I still don't say no to doorstops though as I am collecting lead for some alum experiments.....

Thank you John k, for this important thread!
Les

[caldovicd]

I am looking for a while for voltage logger to log data to determine battery charging curve. This one seems OK for me. Does someone have experience with it? EL-USB-3 EasyLog Voltage Data Logger
Since it has measuring voltage range from 0-30V, what do you think - will SSG h wave peaks damage device? Similar West Mountain Radio CBA data logger has measuring voltage range 0-55V, and someone suggest to use it.