Batteries

[Mike DavidsonParticipant @mikedavidson22772]

To all modellers who are in the dark over which batteries to buy and how to charge them .    I have discovered a website where good batteries are available, if you wish to visit this site, put Yuasa Batteries into your search engine, and then from the menu select industrial automotiveand motorcyclethen, have a look at the range of batteries available, I saw a prtticularly interesting 12 volt 7 amp hour gell cell as soon as the page opened. From that page there is a link to a site called battery shop who quote a terriffic supply service for whatever batteries or cells you need.

 ALSO, I am in correspondence with a company that published a battery charger that is the bees knees I have asked if I can make these at cost for modellersIt will solve loads of problems if I can do that without infringing copyright, That will be possible if they waive royalties like I have asked them to do.In the meantime, I will continue trying to work out a way round it.

[Mike DavidsonParticipant @mikedavidson22772]

[JC Uknz 1Participant @jcuknz1]

I use the Yuasa [ and other makes ] 12v 7Ah batteries and they last me well. Sealed wetcell and recharge them with a regular car battery charger [4<5amp]. Principly in boat which features in my avator   My wife has a smaller boat and she uses the smaller 12v 1.2Ah.  It may not make sense if you use regular lower voltage boat motors but I have recycled 24v motors from old photocopiers.  Later photocopiers don’t have the goodies that the old ones I scraped did I understand.

[60wattParticipant @60watt]

Mike,the 12-7 NP are 9 pence cheaper at Rapid and they are pretty good for service too.

 

While I use Rapid,I never buy 12 volt lead acid batteries of that size.Burglar alarm companies take the 2.6 amp hour standby ones to recycling yards and a high proportion are fine.

Why am I reminded of Viz magazine

Edited By 60watt on 12/11/2009 08:38:33

[Mike DavidsonParticipant @mikedavidson22772]

Well, I am dumbfoundedafter all the experienced modellers saying that on no account should you use a car battery charger to charge the smaller less robust model batteries,here you are blythely saying that you do just that. I am wondering if all your family have a full compliment of working eyesafter the almost certain battery explosions that have taken place as the amount of hydrogen gas generated by the chemical changes in the electrolyte of a sealed battery, none of the ones I have have vents to allow gas to escape. If you remember, I told you that the best charge rate is one tenth of the rated ampere / hour capacity of the battery which in the case of a 12-7 battery is seven ampere hours giving an ideal charge rate for a completely discharged battery of 700 milli amp /hourswhich is one seventh of the capability of your car battery charger, which works out as seven times too much, and if by any chance you think so little of your own life and the others around you you smoke, the chances are that you could easily ignite the cloud of hydrogen gas around the charging pointwhich is concentrated into explosive proportions, your house would go down well on November the fifth, so, I should take advice from a professionaland heed that advice, it could save you more than money, but you do have to listen to the advice you are given and stick to it. I CAN OFFER YOU NO BETTER ADVICE…………………………………………..Mike Davidson

[Dave MilbournParticipant @davemilbourn48782]

Sorry, Mike – did I miss a couple of posts here, or are you replying to one which I just can’t see? And Viz magazine?????

Come back, Franz Kafka – all is forgiven.

DM

[60wattParticipant @60watt]

   I have several leisure battery (24-40 amphour) chargers and would sooner use these over the cheap ones that plug into the wall or one that claims to be suitable for sla and nicad’s.How do they manage that when the required charge profile is so different?

 Viz magazine .The 30th anniversary was big news.

I don’t buy newspapers either when I can read them online.I justify that by buying model boat related publications to hoard without reading.

    I completely missed the car charger reference on first read.It is there but JC sneaked it in.

Edited By 60watt on 14/11/2009 00:39:42

[mark burrows 1Participant @markburrows1]

hi,this mite interest you ,try these battery prices at -bluebox batterys.low prices.not purchased from but looks good.

[Mike DavidsonParticipant @mikedavidson22772]

Well then 60 Watt, I had a young friend  paralysed at birth who had an electric wheelchair given to him by the rotarians where he lived, The wheelchair proved a bit of a problem because he and his family kept forgetting to plug it in.  I took it on as a project to get it going reliably,and that proved to be a problem. Because the makers saw it being placed in the back of an astate car, they fitted SLA batteries so no acid would spill out and corrode any metal it came into contact withI contacted the MaKERS OF THE BATTERIESwho very kindly sent me a circuit diagram of a specialist intelligent battery chargerthat delivered a charging current low enough to limit the production of hydrogen gas in the charging processbut, an additional component bothered me a bit, it was a temperature sensor to detect heat risesindicating an erronious charge rate, I don’t know about the batteries, but the charger certainly got hot, and another time my own son got one of the radio controlled dune buggies powered by a 7.2 volt Tamiya pack. I’ve still got that pack here, but it is no good as it is banana shaped where the batteries within got so hot they melted the plasticencapsulation. He won’t tell me what he did, but I bet he put it across my home made car battery charger. I deliberately did not mend it to teach him a lesson of what not to do. Keep it safe…………………….Mike Davidson in Plymouth

[60wattParticipant @60watt]

Can you cut to the chase,Mike? You seem to be at pains not to offend (or something) but it doesn’t make it easy to understand your point.

While the electronic chargers I have are capable of 5 amp bulk charge they never get anywhere near that on a 12-7 because the voltage limit is at 14.1 volt and I don’t over discharge the batteries.

Those cheap chargers that have a so-called trickle setting are hopeless.

[Mike DavidsonParticipant @mikedavidson22772]

I am at pains not to offend, but you have to agree, that both Ashley and I have said categoically DO NOT (R) NOT USE A CAR BATTERY CHARGERAS YOU WILL BE putting yourself and others in DANGER.  I feel it would be better if we all were subject to health and safety legislation, and had to wear proper personal protective clothing, this would bring home the danger surrounding charging batteriesand the poisonous and corrosive materials within that could jump out and bite your leg given half a chance. I go back to what I said about Ashley and I advising not To usE car chargeRS, and just read all the  in ths thread o see how ma people have said blithely thaT THEY usE a car charger and it does a brilliant job here I go again , trying hard not to offend, but do you not agree that those contributions are encouraging people with little or no knowledge to go straight ahead and do exactly the wrong thing, and are those people going to put their hand in their pocket ro recompese people for wrecked gear as a consequence of doing that wrong thing?????????????   I doubt it very much.

There may be a modeller in Ireland reading this who willconfirm what I am about to say, but this guy had a problem with his boat, and I got involved trying to diagnose the problem from afar by correspondence, but to no avail, so this guy packed all his radio gear up in a giant jiffy bag and sent it to me, A couple of weeks later, I sent all his gear back to him working, I had extracted the duff bit and replaced it, but this story has a sad ending, the boat was sent out to sea, and sank out of reach from the shore, Soanother tip, build in positive buoyancy if you are going to send your precious model on mission impossible, and keep your batteries dry,I am still working on getting the magic battery charger kit for modellers to build. I can say that because I built one for myself, and it is really magicAsk Ashley what he says……………………Mike Davidson…………………………………

[60wattParticipant @60watt]

I’d better clarify then. *It is not a car charger I am using.*

[Mike DavidsonParticipant @mikedavidson22772]

just a quick look at the real basics of batteriesThe basic building block of your power source is a cellback in the formative years of Faraday and Leclanche experimenters discovered that if you dunk two different metals into a bowl of acid, an electrical energy source appears, you can do this too if you cut twoslots in a lemon, and then stick a 10 pence coin in one and a two pence coin in the other you will find that you have built an accumulator, not at all powerful, but nonetheless an electrical generatorthis basic unit is known as a celland it is only when several cells are joined together that you get a batteryIf you go back to your lemon powered radio, the lemon’s acid will change as the electricity is used up, and the power output will dropHere, we see the effect of the capacity of the cell. No matter what chemicals are present in a battery or cell, you will see it’s capacitythis is known to enginerers as the Ampere / Hour ratingIf you look at the cells I use, they are one point two volts at 300 milliamp/ hours, now if several of those cells are connected together in a battery, the voltage risesas each cell is added, so if I have ten of those cells in a battery, it would be tw1lve volts at the same capacity as the individual cells or 300 milliamp hours. I will spare a moment or two to go into the characteristics of different types of cells. The most common is the lead / acid cellwhich has two kinds of lead in a bath of sulphuric acid, this is most common ehere an application draws lots of amps for a long timeas the cell discharges, the specific gravity of the acid can be read with an hydrometeras the cell discharges, the battery strength goes downin a steady declineand the internal resistance of the cell goes down. The cells I use are Nickel metal Hydride and they have a totally different characteristic as the electrolytewill hold up well under loadthe cell voltage stays high for much more of the cycleand drops suddenly at the end. modellers who use ni-cads or NiMh batteries will have the same characteristics, the battery produces good results for a long time, and then stops quite suddenly. There are other sorts of cells available which have totally different characteristicsthey are the ordinary torch batteries on shop counters most of those are zinc carbonwhich is a zinc pot full of sal-volatele with a carbon rod stuck down the middle. better than those as Duracell will never stop telling you are the so calledalkeline cells higher power and longer lasting with a slight advantage of being leakproof. UNLESS they say different, none of the over the counter batterys or cells are r  NOT  Re-chargeable, and therefore give an inferior value for money, but they do give one point five volts per cell, so you will not need so many to achieve your required voltage, so, you pays your money and takes you choice. All the time, it MUST be noted that virtually all cells contain TOXIC materials like lead / cadmium and must be disposed of responsibly. Don’t whatever you do, chuck used cells on a fire

finally, back to the good old lead acid cell, as I said before, these are two kinds of lead in a sulphuric acid bathremember that this is acid and it will eat your boat for dinner,and if it finds metal like a prop shaft of a very expensive motorcase, it will eat it. Only glass fibre resin is able to resist the acidand stay keeping the water out. There is one plus to lead acid, and that is that they give you two volts per celland surprise, I went round the tourist bit at Chatham dockyard and there they have a decommissioned submarine Ocelot which was an educationher battery was 340 volts, and that’s what they put across the motor, it is theonly way the power can be developed to drive a ship of that size, so there is no substitute for power. The submarines used Diesel electric power when they were on the surface meaning that they ran the diesel to drive a generator which charged the batteries and drove the propellor motor, so, everything on the whole boat was driven by electricity, a bit like your model really, and mine

[DickyDParticipant @dickyd]

Sorry,it may be me but does anyone know what Mike is on about.

 

I and most of the people people I know on another large boat forum I am on get their batteries and chargers from the   component-shop.co.uk   who normally do next day delivery if ordered a.m. and are very competitive on price.

[Andy BaileyParticipant @andybailey80218]

Sorry but its all got a lot to complicated for me 

Andy

[neil hpParticipant @neilhp]

just digressing from this thread, but still to do with batteries, coukld someone please tell me why……….i have just bought a little r/c toy car for my daughter to play with.

the battery tray takes 8 x 1.5 v AA batteriries. on the tray it says ONLY USE ALKALINE BATTERIES.

why is this and can i not use rechargable  NIHI  batteries.

 

 cheers for any help.

neil.

[neil hpParticipant @neilhp]

DICKYD……………..

Sorry,it may be me but does anyone know what Mike is on about.

 

no one EVER  knows what mike is on about…….except mike himself, .lol

[Dave MilbournParticipant @davemilbourn48782]

Neil

In a word – voltage, dear boy. Alkaline cells are 1.5v whereas the nominal voltage of NiMH is just 1.2v. Something inside there wants to see more than 9.6v to work properly.

If you have eight NiMH cells then I’d suggest trying them – you’re not going to break anything by using too low a voltage (although some of our customers have had a good bash at it………)

DM

Edited By Dave Milbourn on 29/11/2009 08:46:27

[neil hpParticipant @neilhp]

thanks dave…you’re a star…..these thinggs are a mystic art to me……now saying that.if I have a 12v rechargeable cell battery..that would be fine to fit.I suppose.

 

I bought this car for2 quid at the school fair intending to convert it to a Talus Tracter to tow my lifeboat but my daughter has commandered it, and has gone through two sets of alkalines already..she can’t put it down, lol

 

cheers for your help. neil.

[gordon blanks 1Participant @gordonblanks1]

i know what mike is on about  BATTERIES i i thought you lot from mayhem  were brainey

[neil hpParticipant @neilhp]

you lot from mayhem 

 

 

ooohh, gordon, that hurts below the belt. lol

wash your mouth out with carbolic soap………..

[Dave MilbournParticipant @davemilbourn48782]

Posted by neil howard-pritchard on 29/11/2009 09:54:29:

thanks dave…you’re a star…..these thinggs are a mystic art to me……now saying that.if I have a 12v rechargeable cell battery..that would be fine to fit.I suppose.

Be careful! A fully-charged 12v battery can top 14.5v, whereas eight alkaline batteries is never going to get heavier than 12v. If you screw it up then the wrath of mini-SWMBO will descend on your miserable head.

Your call…………………. Me? I’d go for eight NiMH cells and tell her it’s going a bit slower “because it’s lazy electricity” 

DM

 

[Andy BaileyParticipant @andybailey80218]

Posted by neil howard-pritchard on 29/11/2009 18:06:29:

you lot from mayhem 

 

 

ooohh, gordon, that hurts below the belt. lol

wash your mouth out with carbolic soap………..

 MAYHEM whats that ? 

[neil hpParticipant @neilhp]

something i cause where ever i go, andy. lol

 

have you seen the “Gumball Rally” with Burt Reynolds and his sidekick, “captain chaos”

 

well, matey….that’s me…..capt’n chaos, lol

Edited By neil howard-pritchard on 29/11/2009 20:26:16

[neil hpParticipant @neilhp]

cheers dave………………..much appreciated……….as i said…….a mystic art……….didn’t realise that a battery can exceed it’s stated voltage………..should have listened in science all those   ** odd years ago.

thanks.

neil.

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