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That used to be a problem. Back before batteries were all encased in plastic. It's effectively a wives tale today.

No! Keep an eye on it fill level as needed I’ve had mine golf cart batteries since 2008 all it still good because I maintenance them

Sadly, no. My wife's medical situation required that we move back to the city.

@@chaddouglas2136 Sorry to hear that man, I hope she will come out of it and you can go back living your dream.

Well..... We have moved to El paso and I have taken employment. This was due to my wife's medical needs or we'd still be there. We live in a 5th wheel trailer in a trailer park, so we still live "tiny," but I am back in the ratrace for now. Maybe when things change I will move back to the desert. We still own the land and cabins.

Good to hear you are doing ok.

Happy Holidays! I hope you have been able to deal with the weather. Have a happy new year!

Because its a 48v system built on 8 6v batteries. I have 2 parallel strings totalling 16 batteries

I’m interested to see someone respond to your comment. Could you send along some videos on the topic? I have been doing tons of research on flooded lead acid batteries. It’s such old technology yet so many people are clueless about them.

You were led wrongly. The boiling point of sulfuric acid is 337 degrees Celsius while water is 100 degrees Celsius. Furthermore, evaporation at room temperature depends on vapor pressure, not boiling point. The vapor pressure of sulfuric acid is 1/30 that of water.

@@richardyao9012 thank you for your response, I'm just trying to get a better understanding of lead acid batteries.... Going by the boiling points of the water and acid, the first thing that I would think is that the water should be the first to begin evaporation, but then again we have to factor in the bond between the water and acid... There might be a bond between the two that changes their properties which may shift the boiling points either way! One example is solder, made if tin and lead, independently they display different boiling points to what they do combined together as solder! Solder should not melt at the temperature that it does but yet it does! So I'm thinking that maybe there's a similar effect on water and acid! What do you think? If we were to bring the temperature up of water and acid, would the water boil off at 100°C or would it start earlier or later? Someone somewhere must have researched this!

Take out full solution from battery. Estimate total solution requirement. Drain solution from battery fully.Prepare solution so that drained solution + prepared solution ( one acid to four distilled water ratio ) makes about two and half litre or estimate your requirement. Pour the solution in cells upto marked level on the cell. Now specific gravity will approx. 1.200. Now charge the battery & specific gravity will be near to standard requirement. Best of luck, my dear.

and run a battery desulphinator. i have 4 on my large 1410 ah 12v bank.

a desulphinator works .my buddy gave me 255 ah 6v batteries industrial deep cycle ones that sat 4 years uncharged no voltage in the cells at all and very sulphated for core fees i could trade in for new ones and i decided to put 2 table spoons of epson salt in each cell and level the water levels and attach a 8 stage smart charger and desulphinator 6v to 12v and charged them for about 3 days each till i had 10 of them tied into a large bank then i put a desulphinator on each series chain.and hooked up my duel 80 amp samlex marine charger for a month and a small 50 watt load so it would keep charging and discharging and equalizing at 14.8v absorb and 15.5 equalizing charges .eventually after 2 weeks i noticed the batteries started holding a good charge and gravity checks came out good and i could actualy see clean plates instead of white and gray crap all over them. i was able to fully restore that bank and i decided to use it on my wind and solar hybrid system for 5 years then sold them with 4/0 cables and bus bar for 1200.00 and purchased some crown cr235 6v deep cycle batteries 12 total brand new. and inam currently using those and love the power i get.i have a portable wind and solar hybrid trailer and 12kw and 7.5 kw inverters and 2 30 amp rv ports and i have 1800 watt array and single axis tracker and linear acuators and a 500 watt 3 phase ac wind turbine that has been at 1200 watts in 30mph winds .in all this system is awesome and wind turbines can clean battery plates off too.

You can find The Ratrace Losers on Facebook. You can message me there. facebook.com/TheRatRaceLosers/

You can also email theratracelosers@gmail.com

Thank you.

So are we! We will be releasing new videos every Tuesday with the occasional extra on Fridays. Make sure you follow us on Facebook as well. We feature new blog posts every Thursday, and short video clips in a vlog style about what's going on at our place.

The batteries have caps that allow them to breathe but not allow stuff to get inside. When it rains, they get wet, just like the battery in your car might get wet when you hit a big puddle. No harm if the caps are on securely. When I was pouring the water in and spilling some, I was more concerned with accidentally washing some contaminants INTO the cells by accident. Also, distilled water is cheap, but I am 60 miles from the nearest supply. I don't want to waste any and find out that I had just one more battery to fill and ran out. I've had that happen. It's frustrating. I mentioned in another comment that I plan to do an entire series on how to properly plan and purchase a solar system. Then there will be one on building that system. There's a lot to learn. Solar power is usually far more expensive than grid power. There are two main reasons to have solar (or wind, for that matter) over grid power: 1) You are so far from the nearest grid power that it would be cost-prohibitive to pay the power company $30,000 PER MILE to bring power to you. 2) You have a philosophical reason to be off grid. In our case, it's #2. I have a telephone pole with grid power right on my property. It would probably cost us about $1500 to get grid power installed here, yet I have over $10k worth of equipment, and I have to watch my power use. We decided that we wanted to live a smaller, simpler life out in the desert, so we deliberately chose to go off-grid.

ahhh ok thank you. that makes sense. i will look forward to your series :)

We have 16 GC2 (golf car) batteries. They are 6v each. Since our system runs at 48v, we need multiples of 8. So we have 2 parallel strings of 8. Each string holds about 210 Ah (amp-hours) at 48v. So we have a total of 420Ah. Of course, due to the natural aging process and the damage I've caused to these batteries due to poor maintenance, they don't have that capacity anymore. There isn't a really easy way to measure their capacity, either.

The Ratrace Losers Thanks for the reply! Is that enough for a typical day's worth of your use? Do you have to supplement with a generator?

Sadly, no. We do supplement with a generator quite often because we have added a significant amount of load since we designed the system. We really could use another eight batteries and another 6-9 solar panels if we wanted to get totally away from the generator. We live a fairly "normal" lifestyle. We have a microwave, full size refrigerator, several computers, fans, two water pumps and a swamp cooler that we use when it starts getting hot.

can you use LARGER batteries like say for a truck or?

Kinda. These batteries are a special type called Deep Cycle. They are made differently than car or truck batteries. While car or truck batteries will work, they will have an extremely short life when used in this application. That said, there are larger deep cycle batteries. And yes, I could use those for more capacity. However, I'd still need to have more solar panels to charge those batteries. When I replace these batteries, I will likely replace them with the larger capacity ones, but get half as many. That would give me the same capacity that I have now with some room to grow when I get more solar panels.

Nope. That hasn't been true since they started putting batteries in plastic.

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