Published Date 1/7/14 11:20 AM
London hackspace is a creative space, I got the idea of manually charging the battery on the spur of the moment as the was a friendly guy doing the same “it better to do it manually” so took up the challenge, added a do-not hack sticker with contact info. Someone comment that you should mail the list, as it would be left overnight.
The “hack” bring a long term low battery back to life. It’s about 5 months old and has been running on nearly empty last 3 months due to winter sun and horizontal mounted 100w solar panel.
Observe amps coming in and voltage stability – how much has this period of light use and low power state affected it. The battery charging is more to do with learning the charge cycle of 12v lead acid battery.
Set me alarm to come back to the space at 5.00am in the morning to check: it had been charging (13.4v input) at about 1/2 amp. Somebody turned it off in the night, had left a don’t hack sticker! After turning it back on its charging at 1.14 amp so it’s recovering.  It holds voltage at 12.77 (up from 12.43)
Turn the voltage up to 14.2 in the morning and keep an eye on it, at over night rate of .5amp it would take more than 100 hours to charge to full… the ams goes up to neary 1.2 at this voltage.
Am practical learning volts and amps and charge cycles for lead acid battery’s
My gasing detector if the water goes down in the pipe… (and it dose if I increase the vots to 15 and amps to max 2.8) at low charging it doesn’t move, no need for the fire extinguishers (:
knowledge in theory solidified by knowledge by practice – exactly what a hackspace is for.