Reconditioning Lead Acid Batteries For Home Solar System
Article by Will Yap
Why do you need a battery bank for a home solar power system? Reason being, some time when you need electricity to run an electrical appliance, the sun may not be available due to heavy cloud covers. You may also need power during the night time.
Sometime, the power generated by the solar panels may not be sufficient to meet the demand from your home usage. Therefore, the energy created by the solar array has to be pooled or stored in the battery bank.
How many batteries do you need for a small home solar power system? Again, that will depend on your power requirement. It may ranges from 3 to 10 units of deep cycle batteries. But one thing is for sure, the cost of the battery bank will be one of your biggest budgets when building the residential solar power system.
To save cost, some solar DIY enthusiast are using old or dead batteries and reconditioning them. But how to you recondition dead lead acid batteries?
But all batteries can be reconditioned though. Firstly, the outer casing of the battery has to be in good condition and there shouldn’t be any visible cracks or leakage.
If you are planning to use recondition batteries for your home solar power system, firstly, you need to understand why a lead acid batteries dies off.
A lead acid battery uses lead plates submerged in sulfuric acid to generate electricity. When electric current is being produce, the plates in the battery will be covered with lead sulfate. The problem happens when there is too much lead sulfate on the plates. When that happens, there is less surface area of the plate in contact with the sulfuric acid therefore reducing the power output of the battery.
When the lead sulfate becomes too thick, the entire battery dies off. This process is known as sulfation. To bring a lead acid battery back to life, we have to find a way to remove the lead sulfate from the plates.
About the Author
Will Yap is a DIY home solar power enthusiast and he writes about homemade solar energy on his web site at http://www.diysolarhomes.com. One of the way to save cost on a DIY home solar power system is to use old batteries. Learn the technique of lead acid battery reconditioning to bring it back to service life.
