Last year I had to do it, and must confess I did a fairly half-ass job and now I faced doing it all over again. Now Weekender Neighbor S laid those sixteen expensive stainless steel bolts on me, and I had no excuse not to really tear Landlady’s batteries and cables right down, scrub and sand and put it all back together good as new.
This was going to take all morning, and it was going to be cramped and filthy and sparky and boring. My joints were going to hurt, I was going to be all tense because I don’t really like working with electricity, and I was going to look for excuses to stop. So I took the boys for a nice walky and then locked them in the Lair so I wouldn’t get antsy about leaving them in the Jeep so long on a sunny day, and I gathered all the tools and my tablet for tunes, put on my oldest and nastiest clothes, and resolved to get down in it and get it done.
Wore a pair of Playtex gloves right out in the process, but I got it all done. The batteries are nice and clean, every connection on every battery and cable has been renewed, and all I have left to do is go back and grease them which is nothing. Destroyed two old t-shirts for wiping rags and I have corrosive goo to wash off my hand tools, but that icky job I’ve been putting off is now history. Ima gooboy … though the boys themselves are still a bit miffed with me.
Before we can get our forest house on the market for sale, our off grid solar system needs new batteries. 12 6volt L16 batteries that each weigh 80-100 pounds. If I can find a couple of muscled up youngsters to do the lifting, then all I’ll have to do is the connecting. I’m so glad for you that you’re done with that. Hanging over my head it just keeps getting bigger and uglier etc etc.
All the area solar companies that used to do that have gone exclusively to grid tie systems with no batteries. Which is kind of stupid since without batteries, if the grid goes down so does the system. Pooey on that!
Oh Joel like you I am not a big fan of working around and with DC systems. Once upon a time I had to deal with an aircraft NI-Cad battery that was going through a thermal runaway. Damn thing blew up in my hands. If it weren’t for my being in bunker gear (I was a firefighter) with a helmet and face shield it would have been nasty. As it was I damn near evacuated my lower tract into my pants. To this day whenever I’m working around batteries that near miss comes to mind and my first thought is to put it off.
When I was a dealership wrench, the guy in the stall next to me cross-connected a diesel’s battery with a charger and it went off in his face. We grabbed him and hustled him into the washstall and hosed his face down, slapped a shop rag soaked in baking soda paste on his eyes, and the shop manager ran him to the hospital. He kept his eyes but picked up some very manly facial scars, and the incident impressed me greatly. I think about that to this day every time I connect a battery – which was sixteen times this morning.
Completing a job that you have been dreading can be an amazingly gratifying thing. The boys will forgive…or at least forget.
And yes, I will never forget the day I saw a big truck battery start cooking off for no immediately apparent reason. If not for a mechanic’s frantic action, it would have caught a very expensive truck on fire. Perhaps appropriately, it was a fire truck.
My experience, silicone gel smeared over those contacts will end your corrosion problems for that install.