Desulfators, Another View [RE-wrenches]

[Don Kulha]

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From: "Steve Willey"

  "There was absolutely NO difference in the cells that had been
on the pulse desulfater for 4 months and the other cells. Note that all had
recovered significantly from the initial condition, and this is what is
usually pointed to as indication the desulfater works. However this instance
shows that the improved care and the improved charge routine brought the
exact same improvement to cells with and without the pulser".

Hi Steve, Thanks for the good info.

Desulfators are an interesting topic. I've been putzing with them for 
some years now; sometimes they recover batteries and sometimes they 
don't. Most vendors seem to be pitching them for battery maintenance 
more so than recovery which is a much trickier issue. I've noticed 
that batts that have been run low on water rarely if ever recover.

I've had some stunning successes with doing recovery and some abject 
failures. I've been using Pulsetech stuff for the most part, mainly 
their solargizers some of which I modified to run off it's solar 
panel *or* a wall wart. What I see a lot is an abused battery that 
will not accept a charge from a normal charger. After a few days I'll 
take it off the charger and put it on a desulator for a few days then 
reattach the charger in parallel with the desulfator and see the 
battery slowly start accepting charge. Recovery usually isn't total 
but I often see 70-80% ah capacity in a reconditioned battery within 
3-4 weeks. Occasionally I'll get a batt that doesn't seem to show any 
signs of recovery at all for some reason.

About the closest thing I've done to a controlled experiment...

I picked up 4 brand new 70ah 12v AGM batts at 3com. They were bought 
for a phone system and sat in a closet or 3 years. I brought them 
back to my friends shop and put them on a shelf where they sat or 
another 2+ years. So what we had were some totally sulfated brand new 
batts. I got the batts for the experiment where we used two identical 
1 amp chargers, a solargizer, and 2 batts at a time. Battery A got 
put on a 1 amp charger. Battery B was put on the desulfator or 3 days 
and then left on parallel with the other 1 amp charger. The net 
result was that after 3 1/2 weeks the "B" batts recovered to 70%-%80 
or so of rated capacity while the A batts were up to 8 or 9 volts. 
Both sets of batts responded the same way to desulfation, then we 
took the "A" batts, put them on the desulfator and they recovered.

So sometimes it works, sometimes not. I've been impressed with some 
of the recoverys to make me want to have these units on all my banks. 
A short while ago I bought a couple cases of solargizers really cheap 
and sold about 70. I got no returns, failures or complaints but I did 
get many glowing reports from people who said they did great things 
for their batts.

Regards, Don Kulha
Home Power

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