testing a battery

[123hotchef]

I am going to take a look at a yellow top optima battery tomorrow morning to use as my second battery on the truck.

Is there anyway without a special load tester I can test it? I know these yellow tops are suppose to be pretty good deep cycle batteries and it is a good price at £50 me thinks.

 

[Barking Mat]

Fifty quid is cheap for an optima. We use red and blue. Yes we use a special box to. Check them.
AGM batts charge at a higher voltage than standard lead acid. Don't reccomenb charging a lead acid and agm on same charge circuit. It will kill the lead acid and insufficiently charge the agm.

 

[gordon stephenson]

Hello Chef,,I have had a couple of Optima batteries, a red-top and a blue-top, How old is the battery you are looking at? I swapped my red-top from Discovery to Land cruised and it was still going strong over thirteen years later, The blue-top discharged completely, I didn't realise that the auto float charger had not reset after a power cut and it won't take any charge at all, Brilliant batteries, but I think that you may need a load tester for a good answer, Maybe a member near enough to loan you one, £50-00 is a really good price if its OK,

 

[123hotchef]

not sure how old it is the guy says 2 years but you know what it is like, This will be the second battery on my pick up and will be used for winch lights ect ect in the rear of the tub and will be wired to charge off the standard alternator with a relay but we don't need to get into that now that was another thread.

 

[123hotchef]

also I know the yellow top are classed as the deep cycle battery and they are suppose to be able to withstand being discharged and charged better than the red and blue top versions

 

[armalites]

If you don't have a tester, you at least want to check it's holding a reasonble voltage. The other option you have is take a set of jump leads and disconnect the battery on you vehicle and see if the Optima will start it with the jump leads on the terminals.

They are great batteries, I have 4 of the YTS5.5 that I use as boost batteries and running a trailer winch.

Yellow tops are actually dual purpose, deep cycle and starting, red tops are starting batteries and blue tops are aimed at the marine market.

 

[gordon stephenson]

Just checked out red-top optima, The specs seem to be lower than when I bought mine tears ago, My CCA was on the battery label at 1050CCA

 

[123hotchef]

this one is 975 cca

 

[armalites]

If it's 975CCA then it will be a YTS5.5, really nice units cost £200+ new. I bought a few from guy who used to swap them as default part of a service on a machine. One of mine sits at 13.2V for weeks after charging. I have a Snap On digital tester and sometimes it doesn't know what to do with them, even on higher setting the display is all over the place and it sometimes shows 130% when a normal new battery is close to 100%

They do have a date mark on them so you should be able to confirm the age.

You will surprised just how heavy it is for the size

 

[gordon stephenson]

Another good thing about Optima, they can virtually take any amount of charge being bunged into them.

 

[123hotchef]

the guy says it is floating at 12.7-12.9V and is 2 years old

yes it is a YTS5.5 I can see the pic

 

[gordon stephenson]

Mrfuzzy, thanks for the info, I did follow one suggestion, Link it pos to pos and neg to neg with a known good battery and tried charging with a non smart charger, Didn't work, When I feel a bit better will give your method a go,

 

[Rig Pig]

We use the red tops at work & they are rubbish compared to a normal battery, they don't last well at all. Don't spend to much on a second hand one!

 

[Rig Pig]

Mrfuzzy, thanks for the info, I did follow one suggestion, Link it pos to pos and neg to neg with a known good battery and tried charging with a non smart charger, Didn't work, When I feel a bit better will give your method a go,

I did that with an MX5 battery, it was dead flat, I tried the 2 battery trick for a few hours without success, so I left it on for a couple of days & the next time I checked it had charged up so I popped on charge on its own for a few hours then put it back on the car, it worked fine and was still on when I sold the car a year later.

 

[armalites]

We use the red tops at work & they are rubbish compared to a normal battery, they don't last well at all. Don't spend to much on a second hand one!

It would be interesting to understand if that's an environment thing, I think you be hard pushed to describe any Optima as rubbish compared to a normal battery. Admittedly mine are yellow tops but I've not found a battery that comes close. I'm sure there may be senarios where they aren't ideal but to say they are all rubbish is a stretch. I did quick search and found some cases of red tops dying but some of them it was same person having multiple failures when others on the same forum had been running them for years.

I was chatting to one of the guys at Battery Megastore in Tewkesbury a couple of years a go and he said Optimas regularly test out higher than their CCA rating(that obviously has no bearing on it's longevity)

One of my Yellow tops came from a bloke that refurbs chilled containers that go on ships(Irish ferries) to keep them running before they go back on a lorry, he said they do kill them but few other batteries can cope with the abuse.

The only other thing I've heard from winch challenge people is that Optimas have a longer recharge time than Odysseys

 

[Bill Edwards]

In answer to the original question of how to test one prior to purchase, I'd say you're pretty stuck without a load tester of any description or a clever battery tester.
You can measure the float voltage but that doesn't mean very much, you can get batteries that show a full voltage but wouldn't power a bulb because they're knackered. You need to figure out a way of putting a load on it and measuring the voltage at the same time otherwise it's a plain gamble.

 

[123hotchef]

I can use it to start the truck and measure it after or connect it to the truck and turn the high drain stuff on like lights blower more lights oh and more lights

 

[wookie]

You would be better off setting up the engine so that it will crank but not start and then watch the voltage as you crank the engine, to test a battery you need to put massive load on it and watch what happens to its voltage over a minute or so.

Most battery testers are little more than a heating element that glows red while you monitor the voltage the battery can maintain whilst you pull a lot of amps out of it.

Ideally you should always start with a fully charged battery.

 

[Bill Edwards]

Putting it on your vehicle is probably the best you've got then. But bear in mind that a warm engine (assuming you'll have driven to where the battery is) doesn't take much to crank. You really want to stop it starting if possible (don't burn out your starter motor mind!).

 

[123hotchef]

it will be a warm engine yes, very easy to start thats why i think putting the hight drain stuff on might wotk heated screen mirrors all the lights light bars work lights blowers stereo