The nickel-metal hydride battery stores hydrogen without a tank — inside a metal alloy. For a decade it was the battery of the hybrid car; today it is the quiet professional of consumer cells and proven vehicle fleets. It also happens to be one of the best classrooms in electrochemistry, because its arithmetic is beautifully … Read more
An honest guide to lithium-ion — written by a lead-acid house. We compete with this chemistry daily, which is exactly why we refuse to caricature it: lithium-ion is a superb piece of electrochemistry with real strengths, real limits and a Nobel Prize on its shelf. Here is how it came to be, how it works, … Read more
A battery’s first drink decides much of its life. Batteries reach dealers and users in different states of readiness — some needing acid and a long first charge, some needing acid and only a boost, some sealed and needing nothing but commissioning — and applying the wrong ritual to the wrong type wastes capacity permanently. … Read more
Because a battery is “only DC”, people handle it the way they would never handle a wall socket — and that misplaced comfort is where battery accidents begin. A large lead-acid battery stores enough energy to weld the spanner dropped across its terminals, holds litres of corrosive acid, and after charging breathes an ignitable gas. … Read more
Temperature is the silent third party in every battery contract. It moves the voltage your charger should apply, the reading your hydrometer shows, the capacity you can withdraw, and — most expensively — how many years the battery lives. The rules are few and they are simple; here they are in one place, including one … Read more
A technology does not survive 165 years on nostalgia. The lead-acid battery — the first rechargeable battery ever made, and still the most-produced rechargeable in history — survives because its ledger of strengths and weaknesses, honestly read, still comes out positive for an enormous range of work. Here is that ledger with nothing airbrushed: what … Read more
Every battery is a chemical reaction with its two halves held apart — forced to trade electrons through your equipment instead of directly. Understand that one sentence and every behaviour of the lead-acid battery — the voltage, the fuel-gauge acid, sulfation, gassing — stops being mysterious. This is the reaction story, from the one-line version … Read more
The lead-acid battery is the oldest rechargeable battery in the world — and it is still made in greater numbers than any other. More than 165 years after Gaston Planté first coaxed a charge back into a lead cell, its descendants start cars, drive forklifts through night shifts, and stand guard in substations and power … Read more
State of charge is the battery’s fuel gauge — the percentage of its capacity currently on board. 100% is full, 0% is empty, and everything useful about running a battery fleet — when to recharge, when to equalise, when to worry — starts with reading that gauge honestly. Lead-acid makes it easier than any other … Read more
Batteries are not harmed by being stored too charged — only too discharged. Golf carts parked for the season, campers and boats laid up, inverter banks in an empty house, spare fleet batteries on a shelf: storage is where good batteries quietly die, and almost every storage death has the same certificate — stored part-empty, … Read more