Odyssey Battery minimum "inrush" amperage

[Guest ratchethack]

I was afraid of this. "Modern Problems. . ."

 

OK, I'm fairly new to the Odyssey PC545 lead acid (VRLA) gas recombination battery, having owned mine for about a year. Lately it doesn't like sitting unused for more'n a few days.

 

After sitting a few days, it reads 13.4 V, which seems to be marginal. At this voltage it will spin the motor about 50% of the time depending on (I guess) temperature. Seems to me this oughta be more'n enough voltage, but here we are.

 

Just now, I put my tried & true "dumb" 2 amp charger on it for a few minutes. Then I read the following at the Odyssey site, http://www.odysseyfactory.com/odycharg_a.htm:

 

Minimum current

 

The minimum acceptable charger current depends on how the battery is used. For repeated deep discharges of the ODYSSEY® the minimum inrush current should not be less than the rated capacity of the batteries. For example, if a PC545 battery, rated at 13Ah, is being used, the inrush must not be less than about 13A.

 

So I take the battery off the charger immediately, since my little 2 amp charger only charges at 3.4 amps (read at the battery terminals).

 

The battery has already dropped from 13.4 V to 12.7 V.

 

Does this mean I have to get an Odyssey charger now, or some other whizzy "smart" charger, because my old 2A "dumb" charger has too low current output?

 

The stock SPARK 500E pure lead-tin battery lasted 6 years and seemed to like the old 2 amp "dumb" trickle charger just fine. In all that time, I think I only had to charge it once. She worked like a Champ, charged up just fine overnight.

 

Is going from the old SPARK to the Odyssey "progress"?

 

Any o' you electrickery maestro's out there -- Am I missing something here??

 

HELP!

 

EDIT: Oh, now HERE's something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!

 

In the one-page Odyssey "Owner's Manual", it says,

 

Constant voltage portable charger parameters:

 

(A) Standby,per 12V battery -- 13.5-13.8V no current limit required

(B ) Cyclic, per 12V battery (16-hour recharge) -- 14.4-14.8V no current limit required

 

The "manual" ALSO differs from the Odyssey site (above), saying that at 12.7 V is fairly close to 100% state of charge.

 

YIKES! 12.7 V now STARTS it, and I'm more lost than when I began this little excursion. . . .

 

The Web site above would seem to be completely at odds with the "owner's manual" in several areas.......

 

Now it looks like I might've got meself an intermittent start situation rather than a charging problem, but the problem remains -- How d'you charge these things if you can't use a 2A trickle charger??

 

[slouching off to the shop now, with connection tightening in mind.....]

 

UPDATE and Partial Answer -- Checked output of 2A trickle charger: 11.6V

 

Would appreciate suggestion on new charger -- prefer one for double duty, bikes and cars.

 

TIA

[quazi-moto]

I use a Hawker Oddity myself with decent results. I could be way off base, but I was under the assumption that if a battery was rated at 13ah @ a 10 hour rate then it would need to be charged at 1.3 amps for ten hours to bring it up from fully discharged to fully charged. I'd be very cautious about charging the little oddity at 13 amps. The sucker might boil dry.

[guzzi jon]

I overcharged my Odyssey when I first got it base on some info I read on one of the forums, sucker sits for a couple of months and still fires the bike right up, never charged it other than pre-installation, use em in all my guzzi's except the griso. I would look for something else confounding the problem

[jrt]

I bought a little Optimate charger on recommendation of my dealer. He claimed it would charge about anything and bring a few batteries back from dead. After using it on 3-4 good batteries (two WestCo sealed, several lead acid) and 2 very dead batteries, I am very impressed. One of the WetCo batteries was very dead and wouldn't recharge. Even though it was a year old, they gave me a new one- no questions. I brought back another lead-acid battery back from death with a 5 day desulfation cycle. I like it- it's a great little charger and it should work on Oddities and and other batteries.

[Greg Field]

RH:

 

Just get a cheap 10-amp car charger from the auto parts store. Odysseys like to be whacked hard with amperage once in a while. Give it the 10-amp rate for 6-8 hours, and it will likely come back to life.

 

That said, the problem may really be an impending Valeo starter failure. They start cranking slow before they blow.

[dlaing]

I bought a 6A Odyssey Optimizer. It works great, but was a little over $100.

A better deal appears to be the $70 6A Odyssey Ultimizer

http://www.batterymart.com/c-odyssey-ultim...y-chargers.html

It won't whack your battery hard with over 15V of battery killing whomp.

It will stay within the recommended range.

You might want to reserve whacking it for when she won't put out despite giving her hours of 14.4 to 14.8V

Gary Cheek, Ryland and I had a lengthy battle over how hard you should whack it.

After a few days of bickering, I yielded that it is OK to go over 15V, but I would not yield that it is OK to do that for very long nor very much over 15V.

I will only use the automotive charger if the battery won't recover otherwise.

Obviously Greg Field has plenty of experience resurrecting and maintaining AGM batteries.

And so did Gary Cheek.

Gary mentioned getting years of service out of Odysseys with an automotive charger that put out more than 15V.

Perhaps Odyssey gets kickbacks for promoting certain chargers

Maybe, maybe not.

I shelled out the money to play it safe.

But I am sure others are getting by fine whacking it.

The Optimizer mounts on my wall and comes with a quick disconnect for easy charging. I can plug it in for minutes or hours and feel confident of the performance.

No need for alligator clips to short out against the ECU.

[orangeokie]

My dealer, too, recommended the Odyssey charger. Why argue with success?

[Greg Field]

I sell Odysseys at Moto Intl. Nearly every day I have reason to charge one of them. I managed to ruin one with the very unsophisticated multi-battery charge out in the shop. It was the only battery hooked up and was on full power for over 24 hours. Now, instead of using that big-ass charger, I brought in my el cheapo auto charger and use that for the whacking. It has done the job every time where BatteryTenders and the like do not.

 

I like the Optimates, though. They go sometimes over 15v but are current limited.

[Guest ratchethack]

Thanks, Guys. Here's wot I learned from this little excursion:

 

The Odyssey "manual" and their Web site have widely divergent, even incompatible instructions on charging the PC545.

 

Since the Guzzi now starts consistently with 12.6-12.7V (after I evidently DISCHARGED IT with my 2A charger @ 3.4A and 11.6V ), I apparently had a less than good connection at the battery terminals to make starting a 50-50 proposition at 13.4V. Put more torque on the terminals, and problem solved, despite the fact that there was no evidence of corrosion or looseness of any kind.

 

Despite mfgr. claims, (as is so very often the case) wot works best in the field would seem to be the best gauge of optimum "fit" for a charger -- and charging rate -- for these batteries.

 

I think I'll take Greg's advice and find a cheapo 10A charger.

 

Thanks again.

[dlaing]

 

After sitting a few days, it reads 13.4 V, which seems to be marginal.

snip

Just now, I put my tried & true "dumb" 2 amp charger on it for a few minutes. Then I read the following at the Odyssey site, http://www.odysseyfactory.com/odycharg_a.htm:

 

Minimum current

 

The minimum acceptable charger current depends on how the battery is used. For repeated deep discharges of the ODYSSEY® the minimum inrush current should not be less than the rated capacity of the batteries. For example, if a PC545 battery, rated at 13Ah, is being used, the inrush must not be less than about 13A.

 

I think your reading of 13.4V was a mis-reading.

I only get that high a reading after charging or riding.

Also, Hawker is consistent in everthing I read, to with .1V...

EDIT maybe the reading was 12.4V, that might explain the V changing to 12.7V after a few minutes of charging, but 11.6V at the charger indicates the charger or battery or both are toast.

[Guest ratchethack]

I think your reading of 13.4V was a mis-reading.

Well I beg you differ, Dave. I got the same reading (or very close) several times on several different days under the same circumstances, and my DMM is a pretty good one that I've used for decades with a high degree of accuracy and confidence.

 

Like I said, I believe the culprit was a sketchy connection at the battery that seems to've disappeared after torquing up the terminal bolts (which were pretty tight -- probably clamping the lug stack "brightened" them up slightly). She fires up every time now at 12.6-12.7 V.

[guzzijack]

Been using one of these over the winter months.

 

CTEK Charger

 

Works well. My Cali EV was constantly draining the battery due to the alarm, (even when only in the immobilise function), using this as a battery tender on the Odyssey stopped that happening and it also revived a dead O/E battery on my '97 V10 Centauro enough to be fit for daily use.

 

GJ

[Guest Nogbad]

Well my old Guzzi pseudo-Genesis battery is still going after I resurrected it using the cheapest of cheap car chargers.

 

If you will permit a small lesson in electrochemistry, the principle of a rechargeable battery is a controlled and reversible chemical reaction between dissimilar metals via a liquid electrolyte. In our batteries, the anode is lead and the cathode is lead peroxide (PbO2) the half cell reactions are:

Pb + SO42- —> PbSO4 + 2e- (Anode)

PbO2 + SO42- + 4H+ + 2e- —> PbSO4 + 2H2O (cathode)

This is the discharge reaction, electrons flow from anode to cathode. When you recharge the battery they go the other way.

 

How much current you can get out of the battery depends on how easily the reactants can move about in the cell. For high current you need a large plate area to give a large reacting area, a small electrode gap so that the ions don't have far to go, and a mobile electrolyte to prevent local depletion of reactants.

 

The Oddity is an absorbed glass mat battery, that is the electrolyte is held by capillary action in glass cloth separators between the plates. This makes the cell robust, and is a compromise with electrolyte mobility between the gel (electrolyte is made partially solid) and the liquid (conventional) battery.

 

Provided the cell is discharged and in good overall condition with no shorts or electrolyte depletion it can stand a charging current equal to its long cycle discharge current, and would not object to charging currents in the short term of several tens of amps.

 

However, as soon as the battery nears full charge and has run out of PbSO4 to convert to Pb and PbO2 the charging electrons have nowhere to go. If you keep flowing current into the battery, the water in the electrolyte starts to break down into oxygen and hydrogen. If this happens at a rate that exceeds the capability of the catalyst in the cell to recombine it, gases will be lost through the overpressure vent and some electrolyte is gone forever. Also the recombination generates heat in the battery, which increases the reaction rate and the problem gets worse.

 

The breakdown voltage is about 2.39V/cell. i.e. 14.3V So, once all the reactants are converted to their charged state, you MUST turn the current off at about 14V to avoid damaging the battery. Provided the voltage across the cell is less than this, you don't need to worry that much about charging currents within reason.

 

The main problem I think with the Odyssey type battery is that it has a pretty small amount of electrolyte. There isn't much extra there to allow for losses from abuse. Once the glass mat is not fully saturated, good ionic transfer from the plates is lost, and this would manifest itself as a lack of cranking current, or short cranking with quick recovery, but the battery would hold charge and otherwise check out voltage wise.

[Guest ratchethack]

FWIW, I found a "cheapo" 10A charger on the Web from Sears (~$45 USD) and discovered it was on sale when I stopped by to pick one up (~$30).

 

Being familiar enough with the basic travelling habits of electrons (at least enough to comprehend voltage, resistance, amps, ohms, etc.), I decided Greg's and Nog's take on this makes the most sense f'er my needs. Wot d'you need 99.9% of the time other than a dual charging rate (2A and 10A) and a built-in ammeter to monitor the charge rate? Oh, yeah -- a 3 year warranty. It'll probably be the last charger I'll ever need.

[dlaing]

Been using one of these over the winter months.

 

CTEK Charger

 

Works well. My Cali EV was constantly draining the battery due to the alarm, (even when only in the immobilise function), using this as a battery tender on the Odyssey stopped that happening and it also revived a dead O/E battery on my '97 V10 Centauro enough to be fit for daily use.

 

GJ

That looks like a good choice.

It seems to meet all of Hawkers specifications. Except for the Deep Cycling requirement of 13A.

US 3300 seems to be US model

http://www.ctek.com/us/MUS3300/features_benefits.asp