Assault of battery

In the past 30 days I have had to replace 5 batteries on my equipment …tractor, mower, generator, brush cutter,  and truck.

In a related issue, I when I popped the hood to my 2012 Chevy truck, I was amazed to find the original battery in it.  Certainly, AC/Delco can make a battery that lasts longer than 12 years.

In a week, I will begin a thorough inspection of the batteries for my solar. That should be a whole new issue.

John F Dean wrote: Certainly, AC/Delco can make a battery that lasts longer than 12 years.

Good luck, John! I suggest you check current reviews. Hubby replace our car battery with a brand he'd found very reliable in the past (like 12 years earlier). He wasted a huge amount of effort on the new one, looking for vampire electrical leakages in the car etc., only to find out that the company had been sold and the new owners will living off the old reputation but selling crap. I'd have to ask him which brand, if you want to know. He's the household battery juggler. I just complain when they don't work...

John, I have to agree with you. The quality of batteries in general has dismally gone down the drain. Well, so has most products it seems. Manufacturers today seem to only focus upon annual profit figures, not the quality of product  nor customer satisfaction. Young people today are growing up not knowing that things really could be made far better. They don’t have a clue that they are being sold crap.

I dabble in the battery world to a degree due to my work in filtration and there is something I have found fascinating.

For car battery parts (To make the actual battery), OEM specs are VERY tight. If you produce product outside of these specs, no worry. It can be sold to aftermarket battery makers who are more lax with quality standards.

As much as I dislike paying for name brand, this is an area that it does pay off in my experience.

I have been looking into alternatives to car batteries.        Using capacitors is one that has been of interest to me,   there is both experimental and $$ commercial capacitor batteries out there.    



This experiment went very well years of use with his setup.



There is a story of  rail car company that had a manager come in and notice that the batteries for the rail cars were not replaced for over 15 years.    The manager was saying this is not proper preventative maintenance.     Well   they replaced the batteries   and    the rail cars batteries started dying.   It turned out the old batteries were Edison Batteries and the replacement were junk,   they had scrapped the old batteries and were much worse for the swap...  

Timothy Norton wrote:For car battery parts (To make the actual battery), OEM specs are VERY tight. If you produce product outside of these specs, no worry. It can be sold to aftermarket battery makers who are more lax with quality standards.

As much as I dislike paying for name brand, this is an area that it does pay off in my experience.

This is exactly what we're seeing in our shop as well. We've had a few car batteries die recently (something I never remember happening in the past) but in all cases it's been a got-what-we-paid-for sort of situation. This includes, alas, batteries that came in new cars.

Timothy Norton wrote:I dabble in the battery world to a degree due to my work in filtration and there is something I have found fascinating.

For car battery parts (To make the actual battery), OEM specs are VERY tight. If you produce product outside of these specs, no worry. It can be sold to aftermarket battery makers who are more lax with quality standards.

As much as I dislike paying for name brand, this is an area that it does pay off in my experience.

That makes sense. I had to replace the battery from one of my Fords recently and I noticed that the Motorcraft (OEM brand) battery was more than ten years old. So I made sure to get a new one of the same brand.