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Episode: 2773
Title: HPR2773: Lead/Acid Battery Maintenance and Calcium Charge Voltage
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2773/hpr2773.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 16:39:43
---
This is HBR episode 2007-173 entitled, lead sash acid battery maintenance and calcium charge
voltage.
It is posted by first time post Floyd Z pointer and is about 31 minutes long and carries a
clean flag.
The summary is, discussion on installing new calcium battery into older vehicles and
resulting maintenance issues.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15, better
web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
G'day, this is Floyd Z pointer, I'm going to share a few notes on the family car, little
four cylinder run about, being a C pointer isn't as lucrative as it used to be.
So it's not a brand new car anymore, but it's lasting okay with a little bit of maintenance.
So maintenance on an old car is kind of important and I could see this as a metaphor for other
types of technology.
To new cars have plenty of features, half of them you're never going to use anyway and
I want to keep the old one going because it gets me around, that's good enough.
I'm not expecting miracles, I get it, that things do break down and need a bit of repair.
But when I buy a new battery, I want that to last roughly the same as the old battery.
In theory, we would expect there's a gradual design improvement that goes into these little
pieces of equipment and we would expect each one should last a little bit longer than
the last one.
I thought about the first car battery that came with the car and lasted surprisingly
well, more than five years I think and I seem to remember that was a gel battery.
And this was admittedly quite some time ago, I could be wrong.
On reflection though, the more recent battery purchases have not given adequate service.
And this last one died in a bit less than two years.
I did some searching on battery technology on the internet, hoping to understand why I was
getting ripped off to put it frankly.
This is what I came up with although there are conflicting opinions out there.
As a C-pointer of course, I spend most of my time in the software industry but I don't
like being soldered dud.
And getting told, well sorry buddy, there's nothing you can do about it.
I figure if I have to make a fair effort delivering quality technology, those other guys can
also make a bit of an effort.
This information comes with absolutely no warranty but it might give you a start and you can
do your own research from here.
The very old car batteries were mostly the open wet cells.
They had removable caps and you could look down the hole and you could see how much acid
was in there.
You hardly see those anymore.
They needed maintenance in as much as you need to check the level and top it up with
a bit of water, distilled water.
Then came gel cells which were no maintenance cells.
What that means is instead of water they had a gel in them and you couldn't top them
up and they had rubber caps and they were sort of sealed.
And by no maintenance it means you can't do maintenance.
Eventually you have to throw them away and if you use up the water in there by overcharging
you'll be throwing them away a lot sooner.
The manufacturers don't usually offer long warranties and there's a lot of fine print
which makes it a little bit difficult to claim and I must admit I've never tried claiming
one but what I'd actually like is something that I can be confident will work and then
we wouldn't be arguing over warranties.
The manufacturers use advertising speak to describe what you're buying and it's kind
of useless because it doesn't say anything.
For example the newest one I've purchased the one that's still going that I'm hoping
the last a bit longer was a slightly larger and more expensive Bosch battery and it says
mega power plus which tells me nothing but you know sounds like it belongs in a Transformers
movie.
Presuming you don't have any violent destruction or a total meltdown there's three things
that I know about that'll destroy your lead battery over time.
The first is you can run out of water in the battery usually that's caused by overcharging
every time it overcharges you lose a little bit of water.
If you have a wet battery you can top them up with a little bit of distilled water so overcharging
is not a big problem for you.
If you have a gel battery sorry buddy if you have a sealed battery same problem can't do
it.
The second thing that can go wrong is the plates corrode and gradually the corrosion causes
internal failure it basically just falls to bits inside looks the same on the outside
but bits of lead and stuff fall fall down.
The other thing the third thing that can happen is you get a sulfate coating so the sulfate
deactivates that patch of the surface where the sulfate is settled and now you've got that
much less operational battery and when you get enough sulfate covering the surface it basically
doesn't work anymore and even though the battery might be physically intact so you've got
water plates etc but with that sulfate coating the battery still won't work so you've got an
almost new battery that you're now finding useless because it's covered in sulfate so they're
the three things running out of water too much corrosion and sulfate coating.
All lead acid batteries are primarily lead of course but it's not pure lead there's alloy
elements that have been added and I give you a quick list although not every battery has
every one of these. Antimony, tin, arsenic, calcium, aluminium, copper, silver so different brands
of battery will use different ones of those in various mix often two or three of them and to make
that more complicated there's a positive grid and a negative grid and they might use different
alloys for the two grids or might use the same. So the new batteries which I haven't mentioned
up to now but what they generally sell today will have calcium as an alloy and they often write
calcium somewhere on the battery and that supposedly improves performance the suppliers don't like
using antimony and arsenic anymore but the old batteries used to have those. Calcium
according to my reading I haven't tested it myself but calcium supposedly reduces the internal
discharge while the car is not in use like while the battery is sitting on the shelf and it also
reduces water loss thus hopefully making the battery last longer especially in sealed batteries where
there's no way to put new water in so you want to reduce the loss as much as possible.
Calcium makes the battery work worse at high temperatures with increased internal corrosion
but it works better at low temperatures so cold mornings not such a problem when the calcium battery.
Australia tends to mostly be high temperatures and pretty much never gets below freezing so the
low temperature doesn't matter so much but I think they sell the same batteries in just about
every country these days so they want something that works everywhere. So this type of battery is
called calcium calcium to distinguish from others such as silver calcium which I'll get to a bit
later so if you're using the car every day and it's getting pretty sort of rapid cycles and a
fair bit of charging time then non-calcium is better provided you don't live in a cold place.
If you occasionally use the car and then go for a short drive calcium can be better because it holds
the charge better but as I discovered modern cars have a lot of electronics in them and not all
of that switches off properly when you park for example electronic locks and RFID type stuff
so a modern car will discharge when it's parked and it doesn't matter what battery you've got in
there because it's discharging anyway regardless of the internal discharge in the battery.
So silver calcium is another improvement and the silver costs more slightly reduces the corrosion
but loses a little bit more water. Now here's the important warning you go to Wikipedia and you can
find a page on silver calcium batteries and I'll read you this little warning that they stick in
there because it caught me by surprise a bit. Silver calcium batteries generally require more charging
14.4 to 14.8 volts and deteriorate rapidly in vehicles which do not provide the required
voltage range. Alternators which never reach the required voltage range will cause rapid
sulfation due to battery never being charged fully. As a general rule silver calcium batteries
should not be installed to vehicles or systems which are not specifically designed for silver calcium
battery chemistry. So just to recap there the calcium batteries are subject to sulfate coating
if they spend too much time discharged and calcium also changes the charging voltage.
So what I've had is an older car which I don't believe was ever designed for calcium batteries.
The alternator is probably set up to run for a gel cell charge and it doesn't spend a lot of
time driving. I'll often leave it for a week and do random short long drive depending on what I
need but I'm not reliably driving on a regular basis. So unfortunately it's difficult to find
detailed information on the battery that you've got by searching the internet but if you try
there is information out there so when I searched the Bosch I found that Bosch sells AGM which is
absorbent glass mat and that's kind of halfway between a wet cell and a gel cell. It's got water in
there not gel but the water is trapped in a glass mat to stop it sloshing around. Then they sell calcium
calcium and calcium silver which are there two slightly better batteries or supposedly better anyway.
So the battery has CCA cold cranking amps and RC reserve capacity. Cold cranking amps is basically
you wake up on a cold morning you hit the car it's got a cold engine everything has to turn over
and that tells you how many amps maximum it's going to put out. The reserve capacity tells you
how many minutes it can drive a 25 amp load. I don't know why they measure it that way but there you go.
Sometimes they have an amp hour rating which is more for driving smaller loads.
There's a little green ball test in most of the new ones anyway which is testing specific gravity
and if you stare down the little black hole you can see the green ball
and it's supposed to be telling you if it's discharged so the green ball goes away it turns black if
it thinks discharged. The problem is it's a bit useless it doesn't tell you anything about the
condition of the plates it doesn't tell you if all the cells have good water it's a really rough
test but I guess it's easy so it's there. Anyway after searching through the Bosch leafletten and
part lists I found I have calcium calcium in my latest battery and like I said it's a little bit bigger
because I thought well I need every advantage I can get here and hopefully it's going to last
better than the last one which was two years. The previous one by the way was not Bosch it was a
bit of a no-name battery. Very likely the last battery died from sulfate surface coating
just like it says in the Wikipedia article if you put a calcium battery into an older model car
that was not originally designed for calcium. The green ball test was not helpful because it doesn't
give you any indication of sulfate problems. So like I said earlier every generation of car
they put more electronics in it and more things that you can't switch off and so they drain
the battery faster when they're parked. Now you can disconnect the battery by unhooking the terminal
and like putting a little bit of plastic over it or something and then those electronic devices
like the stereo whatever they don't like that because they not used to being disconnected
and you get security modes and stupid stuff like that and also it's massively tedious.
So if you get called out for you know you've got to go somewhere in a hurry you don't want to be
going oh I need a spanner and muck it around with terminals and bolt the thing back on and then
you don't want to have to remember to unbolt it when you get home again and over time if you're
balting and unbolting it's going to give where the terminal is going to be all scratched and
the bolt won't be real good anymore after a while. So the thing is you want to park the car
leave it there and then put a trickle charger or something to keep it topped up while you're
not using it but I don't have a garage so I can't I can't keep it trickling night and day
I've got a driveway so I can park it there and charge it now and then
which I was doing with the other one now and then but you know the charger I used
was a standard Kmart $25 charger and probably not the best
supposed to have a two amp output not specifically designed for a calcium battery
and when I measured the voltage using that with the new Bosch battery and I thought I'll just
try this old charger and see what voltage it gives because I'd read that Wikipedia article and
I was saying all right well here's some voltages what am I going to have it was giving me 13.2
or maybe 13.3 volts even after a long long sit charging or trickle charging but two amps is you
know kind of reasonable charge so you'd expect it to be getting somewhere but the charge light
never comes on and the voltage never gets up to the level that it says in Wikipedia that it's
meant to get up to so I figured well this is not such a good charger I'll get something better
and this little thing it's not a smart charger it's not a new model you can't select battery type
you can't select anything basically so I cannot recommend this as a good charger after trying it
it sort of works but it's cheap never work properly and never really got the battery properly fully
charged either and the last battery didn't last for a long so I found an Oz charge battery charger
so that one cost six times as much it cost me 150 bucks for a six amp battery charger
and it's got its own microprocessor it's got a smart charging cycle it claims that it test the
battery before it begins and it tests it again when it's finished at the end and then it goes into
float mode and then if you leave it long enough it'll periodically retest the battery and give it
another little burst and then go back into float mode again so if you leave it for a long long time
like weeks and weeks then it goes through these sort of extra maintenance cycles or by itself
so there you go nine stage 12 volt six amps and that's called Oz charge
and I had a little poke online because it's an Australian company it's called the Zulux Group
and I hope they do some R&D locally I'm not sure the website shows them at a trade booth in
Las Vegas so you know I'm happy to see Australian companies that make something and go somewhere
I think a lot of what they do is importing and rebranding when I go I don't work there
I'm not plugging their products specifically I just bought their charger and gave it a go so
I don't know a whole lot about the company the charger comes with your standard crocodile clips
and these hook up via a little quick connect intermediate connector and I've seen quite a few
other charges with that actually the older charges don't have it but the new charges seem to have it
pretty common actually and it also comes with a stub lead and some ring terminals
and the same quick connect clip so if you're always recharging the same car you can hook that up
and you've got your quick connect permanently connected you just cable tie it off in the corner
somewhere under the bonnet and then when you want a charge you've got a place you just
whack it straight in and plug it in and off it goes and that's pretty easy because if you're tired
and you're not paying attention or something you can't really get it wrong it's got a nice little
rubbery cap that goes over to keep water and dirt out of the connector with some cars you might
even be able to sneak that connector around out under the bumper somewhere so you don't have to
open the bonnet but I couldn't quite get it to reach on the front of the charger you've got a
bunch of selector buttons on kind of a plastic membrane thing and you can select the battery type
so it knows about gel and it's got the voltages listed as well so it says gel will give you 14.1
volts a GM or wet cells will give you 14.4 volts those are not quite as sensitive to overcharge the
gel is very sensitive to overcharge so they're a bit conservative good a little bit lower voltage
then the calcium needs a higher voltage you can select that it'll give you 14.7 volts
and the calcium is not quite as sensitive to overcharge you still don't want to whack it too hard obviously
that's what you've got your microprocessor for because it does testing as it goes so it makes
sure it doesn't do too much so the older car designed for gel or a GM cells with the older alternator
might not be broken but it's not in brand new condition it'll never properly charge your calcium
battery and if you're using it only occasionally that's even worse because the battery basically
never gets fully charged and gradually destroys itself with sulfate so I got this smart charger
and when you read the book it goes through this entire process of rejuvenating charging
extra charging topping up whatever else it's got a fault light if the connection's bad
or if some stage doesn't work or it doesn't get the response back from the battery that it's
expecting it lights a fault light this will give you a little bit of advanced warning so for
example if you put the thing through a regular cycle once every couple of weeks and then it says
well this usually works but this week you're getting a fault light then probably there's something wrong
and if you're getting that on a regular basis almost certainly it's time for a new battery
because the things just done what it can and it's never going to make it work
they also claim it has the ability to remove sulfate from the surface of the battery cells
and this is a special patented method of sulfate removal and when I looked around apparently
quite a lot of charges have this patented method and when you look at what they're doing they
just give it an extra bit of voltage for a short while then they let it cool down and have a
little peek at what it did and then they give it another couple of bursts of voltage and then let
it relax again so that's all their patented method but apparently every guy is patenting the same
method or maybe there's some tiny variation but that's all basically what they do I don't know
if it works but I'm willing to give it a try what the haircut couldn't be any worse off than I
was last time round so you've got a current selection one amp four amp and six amp on this particular
device there's other models from the same brand that goes up to 12 amp probably if you got a truck
or something that might be fine but four amp is plenty for my purposes so I got this thing charged
and I went through the full cycle I got a green light at the end it was happy I didn't get the
fault light and I'd hope so because it's brand new battery now but at least I've been through
the cycle once and I was surprised actually for a brand new battery I had driven it twice I think
and not far distance I'd only been started a handful of times and it still gave it a fair bit of
charge so it spent there a fair while pumping charge into it before it was happy with it so
the battery as it was normally brand new still was not 100% charged so there you go
what I found with the voltage when I measured it just sitting in the car parked you get 13.0
volts sitting on the battery and then when you run the engine warm it up let it sit on an idle
for a while you get a float voltage of 13.7 volts so if you're driving around at 13.7 volts
the battery will basically top up a little time at a charge and just make sure it doesn't discharge
too much that's fine as a float voltage and it's guaranteed to be safe from overcharging
but if you calcium batteries down a little bit that's not sufficient to charge it up properly
so yes it's okay for driving around and stuff like that but at some point you will have to do a
proper charge with the external charger all right so let's look at some other smart charges
because this has become a pretty popular idea there's a whole bunch of people doing it
and I thought well I've got this one but if I'm going to start talking about I might as well
mention a few of the others I found one from century you probably heard of century batteries
it was a smart charge of 160 it looks very very similar to the Oscharge it's got the same
specifications the case is a little bit different shaped but the front panel layout looks the same
exactly the same even the little buttons are in the same place so I suspect the guts of that
is probably got the same circuit board in it as the Oscharge I found SCA battery charge 155 bucks
is a seven stage twelve volt six amp slightly different box and different front panel
there's a few cheaper models from these guys they say yes it can do calcium batteries
but as far as I could see it didn't have any specific settings for calcium I could be wrong
because I didn't actually buy it I just scan through the stuff that's online the cheaper model is
only a three stage four amp charger and that comes in just under a hundred bucks and got very good
reviews a lot of people seem to like it doesn't have very many features but I guess probably people
don't want too many features just plug it in use it don't think about it the only question is
can it automatically detect the battery type and I'm not sure maybe they just sort of set the
voltage somewhere kind of roughly in the middle and say oh well this is a bit good for everything
or maybe they've got some clever tricks in there it's hard to tell believe it or not there's a
brand of charger called voltage which is sort of trademarking a generic term if you ask me I think
that's sort of thing backfires on you because you're never going to get brand recognition
they make an eighth stage 12 volt 16 amp charger which is a bit of a monster for 230 bucks it's
got a lovely lit up front panel with all little bar graphs and stuff on it this voltage brand
sells a whole bunch of cheaper reasonably priced charges they've got even some old
moving needle kind of front panel charges but they're not the smart ones and I suspect they don't
have any settings for calcium batteries I found a projector but a brand that's six stage 12 volt
four amp smart charger that's 130 bucks I found a Ctech brand eight stage 12 volt five amps
quite a lot of these have the same quick connect connectors in the middle of the charging leads
but unfortunately they're not all exactly the same style so you kind of have to look around to see
make sure if you're going to get those quick connect ones that they are going to match up
or else you have to get rid of whatever other leads you've got and replace it with those
there's a battery link brand quite similar they're pretty cheap microprocessor control they didn't seem
to see much seem to be generic there's a max lee brand nine stage they claim which will
automatically detect 12 or 24 volts 10 amps smart charger doesn't mention calcium batteries but it
was pretty cheap at 80 bucks maybe that's a bit oldish and that's why they're selling them out I
don't know last one this is a classic there's one called arc pack seven stage 12 volt seven amp
charger has a fully backlit LCD front panel a menu system a graphical display of the battery a
display of the current voltage you can either plug it into AC mains power or it'll take DC input from
some other device it will estimate the time to tell you how much charge and I had to search around
a bit to get a price but I saw one for 500 bucks you'd probably want to have a lot of good reason
to buy that but anyway look nice if you want to spend money and have a good looking charger
here's my conclusion just like the gpl as I mentioned earlier this is provided with absolutely no
warranty do your own research as far as I can tell most people don't know or care about the
difference between different types of lead acid battery even if you go to the mechanic or if
you look for a guy that's selling your battery they don't seem to pay any attention the information
varies some people claim the voltage doesn't matter one voltage fits all other people claim it's
very important on the document for the Oz charge it very clearly said don't select the calcium
battery if you've got a gel cell because you'll probably over charge it and that's bad for it
and don't select gel cell if you've got a calcium because the voltage will be insufficient and it
won't charge so some people believe the voltage is very important and I'm coming to that conclusion
myself if you have an older car and you don't drive it every day and you do kind of occasional
short trips or you'll leave it sitting in the driveway affair while probably you need a charger
and you need a smart charger to sort that out otherwise you end up with a short lifespan battery
and you'll be thrown it out again so these smart charges they're pretty good they've got a
microcontroller they've got a whole bunch of smart kind of algorithms built in people have done a
lot of work on them they test as they go they discharge recharge discharge and then sort of
test in bits as they go charging up and if you've got a calcium battery I would recommend you find
a charger which has specific calcium settings on it and make sure you use those settings and if
you've got a gel battery make sure you don't use the calcium settings having those o-ring stub cables
permanently connected to your battery with a quick connector is really handy so if you're doing
that regularly you probably want to set up that little thing or get your local mechanic to set it
up and have it all ready to go that's it thanks
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