Re: Battery maintenance?

[bh]

RE; "..a modern convenience" ? Frank; -at the risk of showing my age, I recall , in the ’50s, when acid cell batterys were all 6v ,
and re-buildable, usually at the local rad shop; -in my northern climes, one would put the car ‘up on blocks’ for the winter,
and take the battery out and down to the local service station to be kept on charge for the winter.
If left to discharge and sit, it would sulfate out and require re-building.
At the gas station, a rack of maybe 20 batterys would be in a row, on a heavy wood bench,
never on the concrete ! (an urban myth I believe] and all be connected in parallel to what appeared to be
a home built charger, [Heathkit, Allied ?] consisting of a transformer and two big vacuum tubes,
[‘valves’, the Brits call them] that glowed red and rectified the AC current to DC . We now use diodes.
Small sharp pointed spikes would be stuck into the battery posts and connected with bare copper wire .
I am not sure if this device actually ‘floated’ or not, but did keep the battery up over the winter.
All to say, ‘what goes around, comes around’, only now it comes from ‘off-shore’ 😥