I have recently accidentally come into possession of a bunch of old lead acid batteries, ranging from a few months to several years without charging or maintenance. I could just get rid of them, but I would like to recondition and reuse them as additional power storage for my solar array, if possible. I have been looking at desulfator chargers online and I am planning on getting one and hooking it up to the batteries and just seeing what happens.
Does anyone have any experience reconditioning old lead acid batteries? Are there pitfalls I should be aware of? Since they are of unknown condition, am I better off scrapping them and buying new?
A “battery tender” or similar can sometimes help batteries that aren’t too far gone. And check water levels like the other comment mentioned.
I’ll read up on those. I want to have a trickle charger attached to my main power anyway for the known-good batteries in my array to keep them from discharging too far in low production times, so if they hold a charge they’ll probably live on one permanently