Gates glow battery longevity

[fly boy3]

Hi all, I was putting my Gates Energy 2 volt glow battery on charge when on the underside I spotted a date. This was the purchase date long ago. 4/4/91 !

20 years service and still going strong, but it does get a few odd glances from the newbies. LoL

[Peter Beeney]

fly boy 3,

I’m not in the least bit surprised to see your Gates battery lasting so long. Many years back I was involved to some extent with a small variety of industrial batteries, Gates were amongst them. The smaller cylindrical two volt ones were labelled Cyclon, with the black and white logo, we used those by the cart load, but oddly enough all the other sizes came in an orange coloured plastic type case with no identification whatsoever. Not a single mark! However, this did not deter at all from the fact they were easily the best of the bunch!

One size we used, a SLA 12 volt, was about the size of a king sized flight box battery, and weighed 8 kilos. We used these, two in parallel, as starter batteries for the smaller generator sets, 2.5 - 3 litre diesel engines. They were given as having 100Ah capacity and they probably surpassed this every time. The larger gen sets had starter batteries the size and weight of a small car. I had a Peugeot 205 van at the time, with the 1900cc XUD engine, the battery failed eventually so I installed one of these. I had to pack out the battery compartment with polystyrene foam considerably to take up the excess space and make cobbled up connections, it had small terminal bolts instead of posts. It was on my van for five years, it never once failed, and was still there when I sold it. Some of my colleagues drove the firms vans and cars and in the depths of winter, because I’ve always carried jump leads, it would often assist in starting these, too.
Occasionally, when we had the bonnet up and people noticed it, they really could not believe this was the starter battery. One ‘expert’ told me that I would only get a hundred yards down the road before I cooked it.......

Unfortunately this sort of quality does’t often come through in the consumer market. It can be done alright, but I guess the sales of new cells might subside a touch. Occasionally they appear, I’ve seen some Saft nicads that were really good, and I’ve mentioned before that a pack of Yuasa nicads in a JP Apex tx went on for more than 27 years; and the Sony Ni-MH’s in my own tx are about 15 years young and going strong. Generally, at work though, Yuasa were not always given best for their quality or longevity!

Here’s to the next 20 years!

PB

[fly boy3]

Hi Peter, thanks for your interesting post. Wonder if you know where these Gates are manufactured. Is it "The States", I wonder. Cheers.

[Peter Beeney]

fb 3,

Yes, I think that originally Gates was American, but I think it was largely taken over by Hawker Siddeley, in the 1980’s, as I remember it, which in turn became Hawker Energy; the 8Ah Cyclon I use as a glow driver is now by Enersys, which is a global company I believe. I have searched halfheartedly for Gates in the past, but without success; so I’m inclined to think they’ve disappeared. We did meet some of the boffins from Gates, and the other companies, cell development was going on apace, and they wanted to know what happened when the ham fisted spanner men got their hands on them out in the field!

Talking of boffins, and disappearing, a little Yuasa story...

...It’s now the late eighties, Yuasa have created a brand new (large) SLA (Sealed Lead Acid) cell they wanted to field test. We have a convenient test site. So we rip out a large one-off bespoke power plant that myself and my good mate had lovingly put together in the early eighties. Output, in total, about 3,000 amps; although, in practice, the demand would usually be far less than this. We’d more or less had to make it up as we went along. Then I made up another one-off power supply unit from the brand new technology that was coming in fast. It was a bit of Fred Karno, plus total guesswork, the heat test was as many 3 kilowatt fan heaters that I find and group around it and then run everything flat out for 24 hours. Things did warm up a bit! Heat is the big killer of most things electrical. Then Yuasa brought their cells from Japan. They came complete with a metal rack for them to stand on, there’s a lot of weight in big lead batteries, but this thing made the Forth Bridge look like a Meccano set. Well, perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration; but it was a substantial support. When we queried this, it seems that many things in Japan are made to a seismic spec., they have to withstand earthquakes. Remarkably it was all a complete success, and there was quite a lot of interest in it all. More boffins then came to have a play, and we had to try and convince them that we knew what we were talking about. I think it was expected to last about twenty years, at least, but within perhaps five years it had all been completely replaced by yet more new equipment and soon the the whole site was in turn replaced by a number of Town house and flats etc.The building had been built in the seventies and then had disappeared again out of sight within about thirty years; it all comes under the heading progress! And it’s probably still speeding up!

Indeed, I’ve read recently that they now think some neutrinos might be able to travel faster than the speed of light! I could have told them that years ago, I’m sure I used to overtake myself going out the door at knock off time........

PB

Edited By Peter Beeney on 19/10/2011 23:09:57

[Codename-John]

there was a programme about that neutrinos thing on bbc2 earlier, i was baffled, before tonight the only time ive heard of neutrino was one half of a garage music duo in the early noughties lol