Reviving sulfated Pb-acid batteries

This is mostly about the starting batteries in your ground vehicles and storage batteries in your RVs.

Like most Pb battery users, I've lost more batteries to sulfation than all other causes combined. Deep, prolonged discharge does it every time.

I killed another auto battery over the holidays. Discovered this a couple weeks ago. I did a little on line research, discovered a hobbyist board devoted to electric pulse desulfation, which I first assumed to be snake oil, but was eventually persuaded might have merit (I have a background in electrochemistry). I wasn't crazy about leaving home brewed circuits unattended in my garage for weeks (this is a slow process), so I opted to buy this http://tinyurl.com/c62ml7w, which you can find in the usual places for $80.. I was specifically looking for something splash proof and UL listed. This is all of that. Obviously, $80 is not a competitive price for an automatic 2.5 amp charger, so the significant question w.r.t. this piece of kit is: does the desulfation technology work?

Happily, it appears to. Battery under test is two years old, was accidentally discharged (interior light on for days, which conveniently burned out before discharging battery completely) to about 35% capacity (all charge states determined by hydrometer) and remained in this state for several weeks. Upon discovering this I charged the battery on an old school 2 amp charger for a couple of days, during which it came up to 45% and began gassing. I've had the battery on the pulse tech charger for 12 days and the state of charge is now about 95%. No electrolyte loss, no overcharge.

I plan to leave it on this job for up to another week to see if I can achieve 100% charge, then move it along to another battery that's in need of help due to sulfation.

No commercial interest here, I'm just a happy (so far) retail customer.

Evan Ludeman / T8