Battery Capacity Testing

[Guest]

The more serious your flying mission(day VFR, night VFR, IFR) the more seriously your battery testing and maintenance needs to be.

Clarence

[carusoam]

Don’t be surprised to find out... at annual, your battery may be getting the proper capacity test...

At my local shop there is a battery test bench... with a bunch of failed batteries sitting at the foot of it.... we could probably see interesting numbers of various brands of dead batteries heaped there...

real close by, is where the spark plugs get cleaned and gapped and other tests...

PP thoughts and old observations of the main hangar...

Best regards,

-a-

[wishboneash]

I recently got this beautiful beast of a load tester which I used on my aging Concorde RG35-AXC battery and as expected it was right on the brink of passing at a little over 80%. I may re-test again after another full charge in a few months when it is colder and give it a full charge of around 14.2V. This test was done after taking it off the battery minder at 20C and open circuit voltage was 13.46V. Measurements were taken every 5 minutes. Next time, I will automate the measurements and take more frequent readings since the voltage starts to plummet once it reaches around 11V.