Car battery - in a spot of bother (1 Viewer)

[Jon]

I've got an MOT booked for tomorrow, but find my car battery is flat. So I take the battery out and find it is a Silver Calcium type. My battery charger is about 20 years old and the label says it is for all 12V lead acid car batteries.

Will it charge it, even if just a little bit, so that I could start the car and get it to the garage?

Typical that I get my first flat battery in 5 years and it is a day before I need to go to the garage. Sods law.

 

[Minty]

Silver Calcium are a type of lead-acid battery allegedly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_calcium_battery

So suspect you would be good to go with your charger?

 

[Jon]

I've been reading some stuff where folks can't seem to get it charged with a normal battery charger. Since this is the first time I am trying to get it charged, I am in the dark. What alerts me to potential problems is my charger says it is over 80% charged after 5 minutes of connecting it all up!

 

[Minty]

The Silver calcium batteries operate at a higher voltage - 14.4V ish so your charger might "think" it's charged up.

I would leave it on charge for at least an hour then try starting it.

 

[Jon]

It is dark out there now. I will give it a go in the morning and hope for the best. My battery actually says 12V on it.

 

[Jon]

I got my car started this morning, so despite the ambiguity of what I read online, my Silver Calcium battery was charged - at least enough to get it started - by a prehistoric car charger.

Edit: I've noted that in recent years, I'm using more phrases like prehistoric and dinosaur. Perhaps that is how I am starting to view myself!

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

The Silver calcium batteries operate at a higher voltage - 14.4V ish

A normal 12v lead acid battery is composed of 6 2.2v cells. Depending on various factors, like its age, how long since being charged its actual voltage can be as much as 13.2v

 

[bob fitz]

Edit: I've noted that in recent years, I'm using more phrases like prehistoric and dinosaur. Perhaps that is how I am starting to view myself!

Welcome to the club

 

[The_Doc_Man]

When I was with the U.S.Navy's Enterprise Data Center, my specialty was a 40-year-old operating system. They used to call me the dinosaur herder. I had to point out that my beast was the T-Rex of its era and that it ate up younger operating systems for lunch when it came to power and security.

 

[Jon]

I remember the days of the ZX81, where you had 1MB of memory. You had to do everything inside of that capacity and it was surprising what you could still achieve!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The last iteration of my beast was on an HP Itanium processor, 64-bit, running in the Gigahertz speed range. I think it was modeled after the "Longhorn" processor, but I know it had addressing abilities into the 100+ Gb range. It also had 8 threads (4 x dual core CPU) and was a literal bat out of hell for most work. On the busiest day I ever saw, when nobody was caught in an infinite loop, that beast NEVER reached higher than 1.7 / 8 in CPU load i.e. the equivalent of saturating 1.7 CPUs with time-slicing timesharing. When we bought it, we didn't need the CPU power but we needed more memory than some of the Windows-based virtual machines could reach, and the smallest model we could get with the memory range we needed came with 8 threads. We were running ORACLE Enterprise Server on it for a while and needed all that memory for buffering. So despite it being physically small, I had one of the biggest beasts on the site.

As it happened, I retired before that machine did - by about a year and a half. They web-enabled everything, moved ORACLE to a big UNIX box of some flavor, and moved the batch processes behind the scenes on a secondary system. But that system that I had, while still active, ran rings around everyone else's stand-alone beasts.