There can be various factors affecting the overall battery life of a deep cycle battery. In this article, we’ll try to go over all these factors and try to diagnose the performance of your malfunctioning battery.
Most of the time, batteries can be recovered with some techniques and sometimes there is just no use in trying to recover a battery.
How to check if a deep cycle battery is good?
Let us first try to understand when can we declare a battery to be irreparable. For this, we must consult the battery voltage chart of that particular battery.
In deep cycle batteries, the voltage generally falls with discharging and that is alright. As such, a certain level of discharge should have the battery on a certain level of charge.
Let us consider this. A battery is rated to have a12.8V when 100% charged. Now if that is the case in real life, you can say that the battery is in perfect state. Anything over a 12V is okay. As the battery gets older, this level will fall gradually. If you take a reading and find the voltage to be less than 11V, chances are your battery is in very bad state and can hardly retain any charge at all.
In such cases, trying to revive the battery is pretty pointless and you should just get a new battery.
Sometimes, you may also notice that the battery just won’t charge upto 100%, no matter how long you charge it. In reality, when you charge a battery, it gets harder and harder to charge as the battery approaches 100% charging. In case of bad batteries, it is really hard to get upto that level. Hence you see that your battery doesn’t charge well.
How to tell if a car battery has a dead cell?
It is very simple to tell if one or more cells in your battery are dead. Car batteries are usually starting batteries that need to be properly charged to function adequately. A dead battery cell can affect this greatly.
To check if the car battery has a dead cell, all we need to do is check the voltage between the terminals.
If your battery is on charge and still reads 10.5V or so, there’s a dead cell in your battery. A battery consists of a number of individual cells that add up to a complete 12V. Dead cells don’t allow that to happen. It can be really bad for a car battery as low voltages can make cranking really difficult.
How to tell if a 6V battery is bad?
6 volt batteries are quite different from 12 volt ones. They are easily discharged and can die quickly if not taken proper care of. A 6V battery reading anything below 5V is pretty drained and possibly irreversibly dead.