BILL BAUER wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:
> How are you planning to define your discharge points,  by voltage or
> hydrometer reading?  What will you consider "discharged"?  I've seen
> specs for that going to,  say,  10.5 volts for a 12 volt battery,  though
> I wouldn't want to make it a habit to run them down that far.  Voltage
> can also be misleading if you're dealing with surface charge at all.
 BB> That's all kinda interesting.
 BB>  
 BB> 9.6 volts for 15 seconds under load seems to be the industry 
 BB> standard for determining a defective battery. 
I would say "able to maintain at least 9.6 volts after being loaded for 15 
seconds",  to be a little more precise about it.  It's also dependent on the 
temperature of the battery.
 BB> I've taken so many back to various dealers which were under 
 BB> warranty and watched them test their batteries to determine 
 BB> whether or not to guarantee them that I have learned that from 
 BB> them. In other words, if a battery falls under 9.6 volts during 
 BB> the 15 second discharge period they will all replace it.
We always used to check the state of charge of the battery before load 
testing it,  a practice I've seen few other folks do.  If it's run down for 
some reason (say,  a bad alternator in a vehicle) then it's likely not to 
pass the test but still will function okay if it's charged up.
 BB> I have therefore adopted the standard of 10.6 volts as being 
 BB> the point at which I will no longer take a "reconditioned" 
 BB> battery out to one of my customers. If it won't stand up to 
 BB> that then I simply junk it. My number of rejects by customers 
 BB> has since fallen to just about zip whereas before I instituted 
 BB> that standard I was having so many rejects that I was starting 
 BB> to lose customers. Thanks to that standard, I am now starting 
 BB> to turn my business around and looking for better days ahead. 
Yeah,  but you _charge_ 'em,  dont ya?  
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