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1. 03:29 PM - A Tale of Two Batteries (Ed Holyoke)
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Subject: | A Tale of Two Batteries |
Howdy,
I recently bought the West Mountain Radio CBA and did some tests on some
old batteries. Here's what I found:
Battery 1 came with our airplane and after about 2 years we decided to
replace it. It is a Conorde RG-25XC rated at 25 ah. It was removed from
the airplane in January of 06 and charged 2 or 3 times since. It mostly
just sat. I charged it with a BatteryMINDer at 8 amps and discharged it
at 4amps to 10.5v. It tested to 12.1 ah, or about half it's rated capacity.
Battery 2 is the same make and model and is the battery which replaced
Bat 1 in Jan/06. This battery gave no problems in service until the day
that the positive cable chafed through and shorted against a stainless
braided brake line in flight. It resulted in a smoke filled cabin and an
emergency landing (on airport). When I arrived on the scene an hour and
a half later, I moved the brake line away from the cable and measured 5
volts on the battery. Needless to say, the cable has been protected from
this ever happening again. The battery was charged overnight (on an
ancient non-smart charger) and returned to service. A month or two
later, it failed to start the airplane and was changed out for another
RG-25 XC. This was all about a year ago. I don't remember if I charged
this battery after removal, but it was at 12.66 volts before I charged
it for this test. I discharged it at 4 amps to 10.5v. It, surprisingly,
came in at 25.4 ah - right at rated capacity. I'm going to swap it back
into the airplane long enough to test Battery 3 and see how that one is
doing.
I also tested a friend's 35 ah Concorde battery which is a year old but
hasn't yet seen service at 4 amps to 10.5v and got 37.4 ah out of it.
In the meantime, my computer's UPS quit working so I pulled the 8 ah
battery out of it and found it to be 5.3v. I extended the leads out of
the UPS box and hooked them to Battery 1 and hooked my computer back up
to it. The float voltage seems high at 13.72, but I'm not worried about
it seeing as how that battery is useless for much else and if it fails
at some point, I have another to replace it.
Hope I didn't bore Y'all too much,
Ed Holyoke
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