Varta Battery origin date

I drained my chassis battery by leaving our propane refrigerator operating, because I do not yet have a 30 amp plug at our house for shore power and I did not want to operate my propane generator to keep our green chile frozen until we left NM this coming Sunday. I have removed the battery and have put it on a trickle charger and I was curious about when it was built. On another website, I found that the date of origin is stamped on the negative battery post. In our case it has the numbers 21 and 12. That means it was built in the 21st week of 2012. After I reinstall it, I will find out if I could have charged it using the propane generator which has its own battery. That is, if the battery will charge.
 

autostaretx

Erratic Member
If it's any consolation, i once drained my OEM Varta to 10 volts (long story, also involved a fridge).

But, after recharging (i always carry a shore-power charger), it lasted another 3 years before i decided to change it out during its 7th (or 8th) year. I should'a kept it... when i pulled it, it was doing better (in terms of "overnight voltage") than the replacement battery did a year later.

--dick
 

Garandman

Active member
We bought a NOCO Genius Charger, which has AGM and Li modes.

Deeply discharged AGM batteries won’t normally recharge without a trick. You have to connect it to another battery, then put the charger on.

The NOCO has a repair mode and will bring a deeply discharged AGM back to full charge in a few hours.
 

robzr

Member
Hey Roger, what is your power system (charge/source/storage)?

You can definitely get yourself in trouble running your devices off your starter battery - a cheap way to address this, short of a big dedicated bank, would be to retrofit an OEM aux setup, it uses the identical AGM as the starter (95 aH), but isolates when the engine is off, so you won't risk getting stranded. I picked up a couple good quality AGMs from NAPA - they are made by Deka/East Penn, have a 75 month warranty.

There are a few options for running cutoff circuits that would let you use both bank + starter batteries until a low voltage treshold is hit, then it isolates, so you don't get run out ur starter battery. Blue Sea, Kisae and probably some other routes to take for this.
 

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