Shimming Loose AA Batteries with Aluminum Foil – Will It Cause Corrosion?

From experience with a weather station in the Scottish islands : it's not very dangerous because there isn't that much power from AAA batteries. Water won't short out batteries the same way a screwdriver would short out a car battery; the leakage would be milliamps rather than amps and heating is negligible.

Still, that will drain the batteries in hours or days. Worse (especially with salt water!) the battery powers spectacular electrolytic corrosion, dissolving copper wires, the battery casing, component leads and PCB tracks anywhere the water can reach, quickly rendering the thing useless and ... quite difficult to repair.

I think this will work. My best candidate solution so far is to first load test the pair of Odyssey PC2250 12V 126Ah rated AGM batteries solo and record the actual Ah rating of each. If they are both at least 75Ah for example, they still may be usable. To charge them, I would use 2 separate 12V 55A chargers that work on standard 120VAC (60Hz) here in USA. I would assume the 2 batteries could remain connected in series (24VDC) even while they are being charged separately by separate chargers. At 55A max, assuming the batteries only hold a true 75Ah max, the maximum charge time should be no more than 2 hours, likely less (perhaps 1.5 hours). I do not know the actual load of the floor scrubber but if I did, it would likely be best to simulate that load. However, using my 500 watt load might suffice to determine the relative performance of the 2 batteries. For example, if one battery lasts 1.5 hours at 500 watts and the other only 1 hour, I might then have a problem.

Results of the load test were as follows:

800 watt max rated non pure sine wave output 12V power inverter was used. This is low quality output with much distortion but adequate for load testing.

Load was a pair of 300 watt incandescent bulbs estimated to draw 250 watts at the lower voltage (estimated 110V) output of the inverter.

Battery # 1 (the expected weaker one from previous other load testing)

Part 1: 48 minutes at an estimated 500 watts.

Part 2: Load was then reduced to approximately 250 watts for another 0.5 hours (one bulb was turned off with no interruption of load).

Total calculated watt hours is therefore (0.8 hours * 0.5 kW) + (0.5 * 0.25 kW) = 0.4 KWh + 0.125 Kwh = 0.525 KWh There was supposed to be a part 3 with an even lower load but I cancelled it cuz the load is not representative of a floor scrubber so it is not really relevant but I would call the battery about 0.6KWh total had I let part 3 conclude. Remember the KWh rating of a battery decreases when the average load increases. If the floor scrubber is something like 50A at 24VDC, this first battery wont do well cuz it only lasted 0.8 hours at an estimated 42A.

Part 1 of the test is the most significant since the load of the floor scrubber will likely be constant. Part 2 is just to better inform me how much total capacity the battery has but is not really relevant to high loads.

The battery is now slow charging overnight at 2A setting unattended but when I get my new charger I will blast it with 55A for about 1 hour or however long it takes to get a 100% charge. Since the battery is so old, I am not sure if it will "like" 55A of charge current and I may have to use the slower 20A charge mode. Perhaps doing many charge/discharge cycles will improve the Ah capacity of it since it has been sitting so long out of service.

I will slightly "overcharge" it and try this test again to see if I can get close to 1 hour at the 500 watt load. Even if I get that, it is only about half as long as a healthy battery should last so something is wrong with my battery, likely it is way past it's usable service life and should be "retired" to a much easier life such as UPS backup duty which is rarely needed here.