Does anyone know how this miracle works? How does hydrogen passing
platinum produce water at room temperature? Where does the oxygen
come from? Air vents out of the cell as soon as hydrogen displaces
it, leaving pure hydrogen.

Now let's look at batteries.......

Run down your deep cycle battery to 11 volts. Put the charger on at
10 or 20 A and wait 20 minutes for it to charge a while. Open up the
cells and look inside. Notice it's not "perking" away? Why?

A long time ago, lead plates in lead-acid batteries was supported by a
grid of antimony built into the plates. Lead is too soft to hold
itself up in thin sheets. During charging, the antimony reacted with
the water, splitting up the hydrogen and oxygen and causing the
hydrogen to vent out of the batteries in LARGE amounts, causing an
awful explosion hazard as it had to be vented out of the batteries.
WW2 subs had bad hydrogen problems in their battery compartments and
many died from the explosions.

Modern batteries no long use antimony to support the lead dioxide
plates. The alloys used now react much less and produce almost no
gas. (Notice the maintenance-free battery in your car? Why doesn't
it gas like hell and use lots of water?)

Great information is available on:
http://www.vonwentzel.net/Battery/00.Glossary/
http://www.flex.com/~kalepa/technotes.htm
http://www.4unique.com/battery/battery_tutorial.htm
http://www.ctts.nrel.gov/BTM/pdfs/evs_17paper.pdf

Most of the outgassing is caused by CHARGING TOO FAST...charging it
faster than it can chemically react. Charge them as slow as you
can.....with the latest pulse technology is nice, too!



On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 23:18:26 -0400, Glenn Ashmore
wrote:

They do work and work well. We use them on our floor polishers because
the custodians are bad about checking water levels before putting them
on the charger. These L16s (28 of them) get discharged below 50% every
night and the chargers are heavy duty Triplite 3 stage commercial units.
The maintenance supervisors check the level every month and acording
to their logs only add water occasionally. Before we went to Hydrocaps
he had to check them twice a week.

I believe there is a little strip of platinum in the cap that acts as a
catalyst to recombine the hydrogen with oxygen before it vents.

You do have to remove them before equalizing or they will get
overwhelmed and you have to take care not to get acid up inside them.

Cost wise I believe they were well worth it. We paid right at $600 for
90 of them and our battery replacement costs have been cut in half over
the 3 years we have used them.

BTW, we use Kroger and Publix distilled water. :-)


BOEING377 wrote:
Do those so called catalytic battery caps actually work? The are supposed to
use a catalyst recombine outgassing molecules back into H2O which drips back
into the battery cell. I am sceptical.


--
Glenn Ashmore

I'm building a 45' cutter in strip/composite. Watch my progress (or lack
there of) at: http://www.rutuonline.com
Shameless Commercial Division: http://www.spade-anchor-us.com



Larry W4CSC

3600 planes with transponders are burning 8-10 million
gallons of kerosene per hour over the USA. R-12 car air
conditioners are responsible for the ozone hole, right?