[quote=“sulavaca”]
Its the heat. Heat is a factor in battery discharge and also in battery life span. The hotter the climate, the shorter the lifespan.
Why do you need larger batteries in colder climates? Because batteries use a chemical reaction to produce electricity, but chemical reactions are slowed down in colder temperatures. It is colder temperatures however which increase overall battery lifespan and reduce slow discharge. Slow discharge and lifespan shouldn’t be confused with fast discharge rates however.
Simply put, hotter climates are worse for lead acid batteries overall and are often the reason for short periodic issues.[/quote]
Your comment made me do a little googling, and it seems that you are right. Warm temperatures give a battery better “performance” - like more cranking power from a smaller battery, for example. But the trade-off is reduced battery longevity.
Of course, when comparing Taiwan to the USA, it does matter just where in the USA we’re talking about. Alaska and southern Florida are opposite ends of the extreme.
[quote=“sulavaca”][quote=“Dog’s_Breakfast”]Of course, when comparing Taiwan to the USA, it does matter just where in the USA we’re talking about.
DB[/quote]
Too true![/quote]
The OEM battery in my Mk1 Lada was massive. Can’t remember the numbers, but to replace it with the same Ah rating in the UK was big money, requiring batteries normally specified for trucks.
The comrade-owners handbook had starting procedures for truly terrifying temperatures. In Siberia in winter (if you didn’t lay the vehicle up until spring, for which detailed instructions were provided) you were advised to take the battery out overnight to keep it warm. (I assume you took it to bed and you and Ninotchka were supposed to cuddle up to it, though it didn’t go into domestic details).
In the UK something smaller sufficed, even in Scotland. In fact you didn’t need much battery at all, since there was a starting handle .
[quote=“Ducked”]
The OEM battery in my Mk1 Lada was massive. Can’t remember the numbers, but to replace it with the same Ah rating in the UK was big money, requiring batteries normally specified for trucks.
The comrade-owners handbook had starting procedures for truly terrifying temperatures. In Siberia in winter (if you didn’t lay the vehicle up until spring, for which detailed instructions were provided) you were advised to take the battery out overnight to keep it warm. (I assume you took it to bed and you and Ninotchka were supposed to cuddle up to it, though it didn’t go into domestic details).
In the UK something smaller sufficed, even in Scotland. In fact you didn’t need much battery at all, since there was a starting handle .[/quote]
Amended that a bit to suit my own experience. Bought my farf with the stock Volkswagen factory issued battery that lasted a whopping seven and a half years, then went for the quick fix with a some Yuasa piece of crap or other and was back at my VW service barely a year later asking for the same as was in the car originally. Quite a bit more expensive, but I can’t be arsed chasing after a new battery every year.
Strangely enough a student asked me what the expected life of a new car battery was after class today. I guessed 3-4 years, but I don’t really know for the UK, still less for Taiwan.
Of course it’ll be heavily dependent on quality and usage, so a rough average is the best one could do anyway.
Amended that a bit to suit my own experience. Bought my farf with the stock Volkswagen factory issued battery that lasted a whopping seven and a half years, then went for the quick fix with a some Yuasa piece of crap or other and was back at my VW service barely a year later asking for the same as was in the car originally. Quite a bit more expensive, but I can’t be arsed chasing after a new battery every year.[/quote]
There are batteries and batteries I’m afraid.
Actually the standard VW batteries and Merc batteries are some of the best on the market. It’s hard to find longer lasting batteries.
As far as the Yuasa brand, it’s a pretty bog standard brand and there are differing levels of quality even in the Yuasa brand, determined by specific model numbers.
I don’t have much parasitic drain, because my car is old and simple.
OTOH, it sits out in the sun, is idle for days at a time, and lately, when it does move, tends to go on short trips because my knee is wrecked.
I was wondering if connecting a large capacitor in parallel would tend to keep the battery topped up and reduce its self-discharge damage. (With a significant parasitic drain it’d likely make it worse).
Possible problems might be that the higher short-term charge-discharge rates might be damaging to, for exanple, the charging circuit or voltage regulator.
Bit of Googling didn’t yield any info on that, but it did turn up some quite interesting stuff on motorcycle battery replacement which I think I’ll post separately.
A capacitor is an open circuit at DC - it’ll have no effect one way or the other on self-discharge (which is an internal chemical process). OTOH a big, hulking capacitor might have some effect on the battery lifetime, especially if the battery is a poor-quality one. If the capacitor has a low enough ESR (equivalent series resistance) then short impulse loads, such as the instant when the starter is connected, will be supplied from the capacitor rather than the battery. A capacitor used in this way is referred to as a decoupling capacitor.
The downside is that low-ESR ultracapacitors are extremely expensive. This one, for example, is $57 and only stores 12.5J at 14.4V (ie., a few milliseconds of turning the starter):
If you try it, select something rated higher than 14.5V (typical charging voltage) or the capacitor will die or explode. An automotive power bus is extremely noisy and transients of 50V or more can appear momentarily. You might want to try clamping those with a BIG zener diode across the capacitor.
I think the only reason motorcycles have batteries is to keep the non-ignition electrics working (lamps etc) when the engine is off or idling. I believe most modern bikes use a CDI ignition system which takes power from a separate high-voltage winding on the magneto. For that reason, a motorcycle can be reliably kickstarted even if the battery is dead. No capacitor required except for the one that’s already inside the CDI.
They also serve as a “ready tank” for the entire charging system, particularly when it is loaded with accessories, or in particular, when the load changes quickly, as in when turn signals, brake lights or cooling fans turn on.
We used to try to get away with running big-ass-caps (from the car audio world) on racecars in-lieu of a battery, but the datalogger would show we’d lose power. Perhaps a bigger-ass-cap would be the answer, but a motorcycle battery is cheap and weights 5lbs that can be mounted low in the chassis, so cheap simple and readily available wins.
There’s a lot of R&D going into ultracaps as battery replacements, but because they need to be “grown” using nano-tech techniques, they are still extremely expensive.
Yes, that’s the point … it’s cheap and it works. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Anyway, a capacitor is not supposed to be a bulk energy storage device and shouldn’t be used as such, except perhaps in esoteric applications.[/quote]
If the effective life of a battery replacement capacitor is 30 years, with no charge maintenance requirement (as cited in the warning about failure of classic Lucas battery replacement systems in the other thread), it seems quite likely that TCO would be lower with a capacitor.
And my motorcycle battery is broke, so I’ll have to fix it one way or another.
It isn’t 30 years, though. The spec lifetime of a typical electrolytic is 2,000-20,000 hours (depending on cost) at the rated ripple current. Ultracapacitors are even worse. In general, I doubt a capacitor would last much longer than a battery under the environmental conditions experienced by a vehicle. Lead-acid cells are extraordinarily robust, and they can be almost completely recycled.
If you want to experiment just for the fun of it, you might like to try substituting nickel-iron cells. They’re virtually indestructible. Sadly only being made by a few niche manufacturers, mostly in China.
It isn’t 30 years, though. The spec lifetime of a typical electrolytic is 2,000-20,000 hours (depending on cost) at the rated ripple current. Ultracapacitors are even worse. In general, I doubt a capacitor would last much longer than a battery under the environmental conditions experienced by a vehicle. Lead-acid cells are extraordinarily robust, and they can be almost completely recycled.
If you want to experiment just for the fun of it, you might like to try substituting nickel-iron cells. They’re virtually indestructible. Sadly only being made by a few niche manufacturers, mostly in China.[/quote]
Is that 20,000 hours of operation?
If so, that is (approximately) a fuck of a long time.
A battery dies just sitting there, which is what my vehicles (and especially my motorcycles, and especially lately) do most of the time.
Perhaps not, but the current work is in trying to overcome the hurdles in order to capture that one important feature: quick-charge. Electrification of cars (the discussion of whether this is good or bad we’ll leave for another time) doesn’t happen for the world until it happens in bulk within America and Continental Europe. America and Continental Europe require quick-fill up to get the extended ranges needed for cross-country travel or to even match what people expect today of not having to worry about maintaining anything until a light on the dash tells them what to do.
BetterPlace is taking the approach of simply quickly replacing the battery using a pit that the car drives over, but then they would need the car manufacturers and battery manufacturers to agree to their standard. There’s also the litigation issue of what happens when the inevitably underpaid, undertrained pit mechanic fails to the attach the battery correctly and it comes flying out when the car is moving or gets into a crash.
So while they’re not supposed to be used as bulk energy storage devices, there are some fairly non-esoteric applications where using them as such would reap significant benefit.
Well … yes and no. Lifetime depends a lot on exactly what happens to it, but broadly that does mean working life. Eventually the electrolyte sort of dries out or turns to gunge, especially if exposed to hot/cold cycling. You can reckon on ten years, tops, for an average consumer-grade electrolytic. Although you can get high-grade electrolytics spec’d for 20K hours, I’ve never seen an ultracap with anything like that lifetime. 1000hrs is the norm. Also, capacitors do self-discharge, usually a lot faster than a chemical cell.
So we’re told. Personally I think the main market for electric vehicles will be the third world, because they’re starting from zero and can install all the latest (ultra-low-cost) tech without worrying about legacy systems … like badly-designed cities. With distributed solar at regular intervals and cars that don’t rely on a human operator (different thread!), battery capacity and weight becomes a lot less relevant. What matters then is total charge/discharge lifetime and recycling potential. If ultracaps can reach the energy density of (say) a lead-acid cell and match its robustness, then sure - they’d be ideal for that kind of application. I know the research looks promising, but they’re a long way away from commercial products at the moment.
Finding money to chase that is probably the insurmountable challenge. Despite admirable and Herculean efforts towards businesses aimed at developing countries, time and again it’s been shown: it’s really really hard to make money from people who have none. Not to say it can’t be done, but the batting average is not exactly good, so capital will go chasing something else.
Which is why electrification, if it’s going to happen, needs to happen in bulk America and Central Europe. So the might of the major manufacturers can come to play. Or at least show momentum that it will happen in bulk in these markets. Investors are getting a sour taste from all the turmoil with companies like Fisker and cars like the Chevy Volt, and once bitten, twice shy. They’d certainly rather not put dough into something (targeting 3rd world countries) that from the get-go is going to be harder than what’s already been having a not so easy time of it.
How long should a new car battery last?
I bought a car new at Nissan January 2019 and I was told now during my service that its not charging as well as it should.
510 is acceptable after 30 mins of charging and mine is hitting 430 on his measuring tool. (brand new would be 580)
Its 2600nt to replace but I’m sure a battery should last longer than 18 months?
.