storing a 12 volt battery

[Stormin Mormon]

Your girl friend came up pregnant, and you know it wasn't you?

- . Christopher A. Young learn more about Jesus .

. .

[philo]

Way back before my time, the original radios used a 6v car battery for the filaments.

In an old magazine I saw an add for a 6v "battery eliminator" and some of it's features were:

No more dragging your battery off to the local gas station to get recharged.

No more acid burns on your carpet!

[bob haller]

i met a battery design engineer years ago. my best friend has a 14 fot blade windmill that charges batteries, so i know a bit about batteries.

i spent hours in a fascinating conversation with the design engineer.

he said store on wood was a old wives tale.. my best friend agrees......

[philo]

Speaking of batteries though...I can say that at one time it was said that batteries must use distilled water.

Though most batteries today seem to be the sealed type...in the industrial field most of them are still the "flooded" type. Unless the water has a lot of minerals in it though, standard tap water is fine.

Back in the old days batteries had a lot of impurities and you did not want to add any more...but today the lead is so pure that sometimes a tiny amount of impurities actually have to be added at the factory to prevent new batteries from over-gassing.

[taxed and spent]

They are wrong. When I was a kid, my dad had a place on a wooden shelf for storing the extra battery. NEVER store it on the concrete floor I was told. Well, I of course knew it all, and the floor was a better spot, as I had something else I wanted to put on the wooden shelf. Dad was right. Sure enough, I dropped a big wrench on the battery, shorting it out with big sparks aflyin! The battery discharged of course. So, NEVER store a battery on a concrete floor!

(In the olden days, the battery case was made of different material, and it could discharge through the case, more so if on a concrete floor. Them days are long gone.)

[clare]

Virtually all auto batteries today have either calcium or antimony or both alloyed with the lead.

Early batteries went through a significant amount of water over their lifetime, adding a lot of foreign mineral content. Today's batteries generally require a whole lot less water, meaning there is not nearly as much foreign mineral matter added to the battery

[hrhofmann]

The reason not to put/store a battery on a concrete floor is that the acid from the battery will destroy the concrete!! Basic chemistry here.

"Olden days" batteries were prone to develop leaks and if stored on wood shelving, the wood would absorb the leaking acid preventing damage to more important things like a concrete floor.

[Fred McKenzie]

Where I worked thirty years ago, there were large banks of batteries in glass cases. As the result of some employees coming to work and finding acid on their desks from batteries on the floor above, a "tray" was installed that was large enough to contain a battery's contents.

The best material for such a tray is probably fiberglass, although a falling battery would probably fracture it. Someone in a high position decided that they had to be made of stainless steel, which also reacts with battery acid. To satisfy that requirement, it was necessary to paint the stainless with a thick coat of acid-resistance paint.

Last I heard, they had converted to some kind of sealed battery.

Fred

[Tekkie®]

philo posted for all of us...

I over-gas if I eat too many onions. Do they have Gas-x for batteries?