Coincidentally while talking about batteries my big dog zero turn mower refused to start again out in my yard, while I was mowing yesterday and stopped to replace the water meter cover.... (The worthless kids who read the water meters for the town leave the covers off or ajar to make their work easier.
)...
The mower refused to restart. I thought that I measured 12.7V on the battery yesterday so suspected starter solenoid or something more expensive. I inadvertently discovered another way to make it rain, leave my mower in the yard overnight. (1" of rain already).
This morning the battery read a much less wholesome 10.4V
. This is actually a good thing as replacing the battery is about the cheapest repair I could imagine.
In hindsight, I should have trickle charged the battery at least once over several winters of sitting in my carport.
But that's life giving me another failing mark on a test I didn't know I was taking. In my defense this was my first lawnmower with a battery.
This will be a good test for my fancy trickle charger NOCO genius G1100 v2.0... apparently a 1.1a smart charger. They claim 8 modes of charge operation.
Analyze and diagnose..... good news is it passed that step so no shorted cells or obvious catastrophic fault.
Recovery... desulfation process uses current pulses to restore healthy plate chemistry.
Initialize, Bulk, Absorption, and finally Optimization.
This has been working on my tired lawnmower battery for almost 3 hours and still indicating less than 25% charge. This same charger on my much larger car battery gets out of the basement a lot faster, but that car battery is in better shape.
This could take a while, but I remain optimistic.
If this charger can rescue this tired battery it will have earned its bones.
JR