Craftsman Rider Battery ( RANT )

[Born2Mow]

Try a a battery disconnect, as found on Amazon and other sources.

Your battery is being sucked dead by an electrical fault. But this can ONLY occur if you leave the battery connected in the circuit. This simple device completely disconnects the battery from whatever your electrical fault is.

Now you may ALSO have a blown regulator which is only sending 1/2 charge or No charge to the battery. Or, you might also have a low-level electrical load (like lights or ignition ON all the time) that is pulling the battery down between mowing sessions. That needs to be checked out.

When you use a battery disconnect, your battery ONLY gets charged... NEVER discharged. They have also ended winter trickle charging for me.

 

[bertsmobile1]

OK Toby, it goes like his
Batteries are made by machines
On the new ( in 1974) line there was no people it was fully automated and slashed 85% off the assembly cost
The new plate casting machine knocked 75% off the materials cost , cut the reject rate down to under 20%
Down side was these two machines cost over $ 9,000,000 by the time they were handed over to us .
The good side was together they could make 10 times as many batteries / day as the old hand line.
But the faster the machines worked the more less than perfect batteries ended up on the end of the line
It was never set up to make "bad" batteries , always set up to make premium batteries in the plate size being used .
SO what happened to all of the less than perfect batteries ?
They got the stickers for the supermarket brands put on the cases.
So the difference between the $ 10 battery & the $ 100 battery is simply the $ 10 battery failed some of the quality control tests .
What muddies the waters was K-Mart was the biggest customer and if everything was working properly then there were no K-Mart grade batteries so they would fill the order with Motocraft or GM batteries .
From cold the grid casting machine took an hour or 2 before more than 95% of the plates were perfect and that is around 500 batteries worth of grids
So they would be hand sorted and the "acceptable" ones got the off road grade paste on them and set aside for cheap house brand batteries .
Similar story for the assembly machine the first hundred or so would always be dubious so we would load the cheapie brand cases in the machine and run it till we got to 95% perfects then switch over to the premium grade cases ( case thickness was different and of course the colour of the tops were different.
The batteries for the auto makers got less paste than the premium batteries that went to battery shops & auto electricians .

The take away from this is
A premium battery should always be a premium battery but because their sales volume is low they will always be stale so require a proper charge before use.
Failing to do this can half their service life.
A cheap brnd of battery could be a higher quality battery with cheapie stickers on it or a real dud battery , it is a lucky dip according to what the battery factory has in stock at the time

 

[rdedrick]

Batteries are not what they used to be that's for sure. Get a battery maintainer with a de-sulphating function. Also Amazon sells a de-sulphater that you can connect to your battery. A few people feel they don't work because they work slowly. Everyone wants results. A person I mow for pulled his battery that was dead and left it on the bench. I told him I would put a charger on it. My topdon battery tester rated it at 10% life last fall. I left it on a trickle charger for a month but it didn't improve. I connected a de-sulphtor to it for most of the winter. It's now rated at 100% health and fully charged. Many trickle chargers now have this function built in.