On May 30, 7:33 am, navti wrote:
On May 29, 9:37 pm, Larry wrote:

"Wilbur Hubbard" wrote in news:ew%
:

Jay Leno has a couple of old electric cars in his garage. There was an
article in Popular Mechanics a month or so ago about his Baker electric
that had batteries that were re-buildable. (alkaline batteries???) Said
they have lead plates and use acid??There was a picture of him holding
one and it looked about the same size and shape as a 12volt starting
battery size 27. It said they could be rebuilt indefinitely which is
good since they were about a hundred years old already.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/auto...e/4215940.html

Wilbur Hubbard

Those batteries are Nickel-Iron "Edison" cells, like those used in older
fork lift trucks. They don't need rebuilding, almost ever. I have a set
of them that makes 14VDC for emergency power on my ham station. They
only require distilled water, which they do consume naturally with
charging. My cells came out of the Holiday Inn in Orangeburg, SC, in
1973. The date on them is 1958 when the Holiday Inn bought them for
backup power supply for their operator plugged internal telephone system.
When I got them, that system was scrapped for an automatic Bell$outh
exchange. The innkeeper was a ham radio friend of mine.

The cells are like NiCd or Ni-Mh...only 1.2V/cell. I have 12 cells in
series. They are not very efficient batteries, as you can read:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel-iron_battery
Waldemar Jungner, a Swede, invented them, but didn't produce them. As
with lots of other devices, Thomas Edison stole the design and called it
his, producing them in 1903. His interest, of course, was to put them in
every home to power the house with Edison's biggest mistake, DC power.
Tesla put an end to that nonsense at Niagara Falls, powering Rochester
and Buffalo with multiphase AC that's in your house today with his
flourescent and vapor arc lamps.

Reliability in constant use, which just kills lead-acid batteries as you
all know, is the reason for NiFe's use in high use forklifts until the
government bureaucrats forced Exide, who bought Edison's company and
patents, out of the nickel battery business in 1972. They made them in
Sumter, SC, where I lived, but made the stupid mistake of polluting the
ground with Nickel, ruining the ground water to peoples' wells for miles
and miles around the plant. Exide paid dearly in court, to the lawyers,
of course, not the well owners who had to fend for themselves with a
pittance. Only China produces Nickel batteries now, unconcerned with
pollution, of course.

Isn't it ironic folks that the US government will take someone to
court for NIckel leakage yet is quite happy to pollute another country
(both Iraq and Afghanistan) with thousands of tons of Depleted Uranium
which is much , much more harmful than NIckel.

DU is so harmful to people and the environment that the US government
often seals it in concrete and buries it deep underground.

It sure as hell does not let it contaminate ground-water.