Newish car battery employed to power pony field electric fence. Likely to have been left connected well beyond the fully discharged state and possibly exposed to overnight frost.
Won't take a charge! Yes, I know, throw it away. However, horse person has gone off with my sound spare. Is *over* discharging an issue>? or...?
Car batteries are designed to deliver lots of cranking amps. They are generally destroyed by a deep discharge, or the very least have their capacity severely reduced.
Use a leisure battery which is more rugged and can cope with deep discharge, or should I say are less damaged by a deep discharge. I'm pretty certain you can get devices which switches off a load once battery volts get below 11V.
There is a thought that leisure batteries can be part recovered by charging at 15V or so to reverse sulphation, but I don't have any experience of this or if applies to car batteries. My experience of car batteries is that unless they stay fully charged, they are relatively fickle beasts.
Provided you don't overheat it and keep it topped up, an extended charge at a few amps might recover it, although I wouldn't be that hopeful.
It is *really* worth using leisure (deep discharge)rather than car batteries for electric fencers. It just isn't worth the trouble trying to manage with ex-car batteries, in my experience.
Using what charger? A lot of "intelligent" chargers are anything but and if presented with a totally dead battery refuse to charge it (many APC UPS exhibit this useful behaviour). The cure is to put any old simple charger on the battery for 30 min's then reconnect the expensive posh one which will work.
if it is not sealed ... I recovered one battery by washing out then filling with battery acid (not distilled water) .. and left it on long slow trickle charge ...
Or a mains energizer! Actually these seem to *tick* on medium wave radio reception.
Escaping ponies only an issue with a stranger as the regulars avoid the tape whether it is energised or not. Hence the probably flat for weeks battery:-(
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