There are quite a few battery chargers available nowadays that will desulfate lead-acid batteries. When I got mine at Canadian Tire a few years ago, the store staff had no idea what I was talking about - I had to open the boxes and read the manuals to figure out which ones offered the feature.
I’ve just checked, a little more than half of the models they offer are able to perform pulse charging, which is what recovers the batteries. Some are more expensive, some are cheaper than this XTreme Charge.
An auto mechanic told me that battery reconditioning using pulse charging doesn’t work on VRLA batteries. This might explain why you found varying results from the charger’s use.
plus the SAE pigtails will work for heated vest/gear on your bike. I’m a HUGE fan of the Battery Tender™ system, but I have pals who get very very good results from the Xtreme.
so? chalk one more up to?
Buy good tools the first time, suck up the expense, and have em for a lifetime.
Occasionally, reading reviews, people have bad results so YMMV.
Quite literally!
After years of not being able to properly charge AGM batteries with our traditional charger, I finally broke down last year and bought one of the CTEK reconditioning chargers. (I also considered a nearly identical charger from NOCO, which had the advantage that it could also do 6 volt batteries, but some of the online reviews felt like astroturf.) While it does a fantastic job, it has a flaw, namely it won’t start on a super-dead battery - sometimes we need to throw a regular charger on the battery first for a minute or two, then switch to the CTEK. It also won’t power 12 volt appliances like tire inflators. I don’t know if the Xtreme has either problem, but I suspect it is true of all similar chargers.
It is really remarkable that one can fit a fast battery charger in a glovebox for emergencies.
The Xtreme is the same. If it is DEAD and you want to try reconditioning, charge up to 25-50% with a normal charger and then swap in the XP100.
I wonder if this would work on SLA UPS batteries? Home UPSes are notorious for killing batteries after only a couple of years, even with little use, and replacement batteries often end up costing a significant fraction of the price of the device itself. Plus they’re usually a huge pain in the ass to replace.
I have no idea. It may work, worth trying.
I had the same problem. After my UPS killed the battery, I took it out and apart, found it is nothing more than a pair of off-the-shelf SLA ones, and bought a pair of bigger but cheaper long-life ones, for a fraction of cost of the original and with way longer lifetime. They outlived the UPS. Here, help yourself.
Take special note about the caps on the otherwise exposed battery terminals. You don’t want something to accidentally short them.
There are way too many choices in chargers. Even after reading articles like MCN magazine’s comparison a while back, the choices are mind-bending.
I’m a fan of the Battery Tender brand, probably because I started with them so many years ago. But I did also buy a newer model to handle the supposed voltage difference for a “gel” battery that came in a BMW R1200RT. It might be my imagination but I did think I got a better full-charge from the new charger.
If you use a charger with 6 volt capacity, or charge 2 batteries in series, it should work. I would put a 15-30 watt incandescent light bulb in series as well, to drop the current a bit.
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