ncali

it looks like Optima has lost or is loosing its good name. Glass mat batteries seem to be the recommended battery now. Any thoughts?

84 4+3

Gel is generally deep cycle. AGM is more geared toward abusive starting type battery. I have an optima in my daily and it is a beast but that's 5 years old now. I prefer AGM, the advanced in house is a Deka IIRC.

Krusty84

I just swapped my 38# Optima red top out for an 18# Deka EXT18L AGM.
Dekas are fairly cheap too. Mine was $92.50 shipped + $10 for a set of brass posts.

340 CCA and she started right up.

ctmccloskey

Hello there,
I spent many years studying batteries and have worked with a lot of types of batteries.

The Optima battery line is in fact an AGM (Absorbed Glass Mat) battery. They have had "issues" for years because they are sensitive to "how" you charge them. I tried a couple and had bad results with both a Red Top and a Yellow Top. AGM batteries are getting popular but is not really the "Best" battery for a daily driver. AGM batteries are designed to stay sealed up and should never vent unless they are being charged too aggressively and have a build-up of hydrogen inside which needs to go someplace. Your car was designed to use a FLA (Flooded Lead Acid) battery and it's regulator can potentially overcharge the AGM type battery enough to make it pop open the release valve. You don't want that to happen if at all possible. In the AGM battery the cells are wrapped in a material that holds the liquid electrolyte and allows some movement to keep the cells wet with electrolyte. I have a large AGM battery in my RV (for starting and ignition) and whenever I need to drive the camper it starts right up. AGM batteries have a much lower self-discharge rate and that is a real plus on cars that don't get driven all the time. As FLA batteries get older they frequently need more frequent watering and their self discharge rate increases with age, (it sounds kind of like me). Flooded batteries should be charged up completely to keep the electrolyte from stratifying. Stratification makes the battery look fully charged but under a load it will drop faster than it is supposed to. I remove the batteries from both my Corvettes for the coldest winter months and keep them on a charging bench where it charges them on a timer.

Recently I have started to see companies trying to make a Lithium Ion battery for automotive applications. These require a charging system that is designed to keep these batteries happy and get a decent life out of them. For now they are so expensive I don't think they will be at Advanced Auto any time soon. When they offer a choice on what technology battery you want to use they will need a temperature monitoring system as part of the charging system to prevent damage to the cells.

I still use the old FLA batteries in all my vehicles except the RV and my motorcycle. I really like the Interstate brand of batteries as their products last longer than most of the less expensive ones. When you see a battery that is marked "Maintenance Free" frequently they are just a plain old FLA battery with hard-to-open caps so you won't be able to add electrolyte easily. I open all the FLA batteries I have and add distilled water as needed even if it is a maintenance free battery. I have several very large 6 volt FLA storage batteries in my camper that supply the power when I am out and about. I have a water replacement system that keeps them happy and will ensure they last many many years.

Your Corvette was designed to use a FLA and the set-points in the regulator are designed to get an optimum life out of the battery. Someday I suspect that the automotive manufacturers will let you choose what type battery to use and will have the different charging characteristics built in to allow you to use things like Lithium Ion batteries if you so choose to do so. For now the settings in your car are designed for the old style FLA battery so I would stick with what "works" no matter what the salesman tells you. If maintained well a "quality" FLA will last a long time and would be the best overall choice for automotive applications.

My advice is that we stay with what works and our cars were designed to use in the first place. What I have always wanted to know is why do batteries in New cars last longer than the replacements we install years later? What ever kind of battery you do end up buying be sure to re-cycle the old ones properly. On some of the today's FLA batteries the prices have gone up quite a bit as they are charging the end user (YOU) some of the costs in the reclaiming process when the battery is recycled at the end of its life.

I hope this helps you in deciding what type of battery to get for your Corvette! Good Luck!

gerardvg

I have a yellow top optima, almost 8 years old still going strong.
Perhaps someone with a newer optima can mention how theirs is going?

Krusty84

Mine is from 2013 and still going strong. The only reason I swapped it was for weight reduction.

cv67

Last two I had bad luck with, prior to that dating back many years they were great. Seemed if they got run low they never charged up right, did use the recommended trickle charger, too.

Mccloskey with a regular ol battery is trickle charging bad for them ? (may sound stupid but had read about it).

Last yr bought $59 Walmart batteries and super happy with them. Can crank way longer than I could with the Optima, who woulda guessed. Walmart LOL
At that price if it crapped out yearly I couldnt care .

Occasionally get tempted to give Optima another try but they are just too much damn money!!

Joe C

- in my 85, a plain old, lead-acid, top of the line Walmart. maxx everstart, 75S, 550 CCA, 3 year replacement warranty - made by johnson controls battery group, $79. it works for me....

BTW, prior to the Walmart battery, I had an interstate (another Johnson control's). it lasted 2 years before testing bad (tested @ several locations). it was just outside the two year replacement window, so the dealer had to pro-rate the warranty pricing. LSS, it was more to replace the interstate (around $89) than to get the new, top of the line Walmart (with better warranty). as cuisinartvette said, Walmart - LOL. prior to the interstate fiasco, I had the $59 Walmart - had it in the car some 8 years, before using it to replace the dead battery in my 90. it was in my 90 about a year before I sold it, so we got at least 9 years out of the $59 special. go figure....

like most things, with car batteries there's a lot of hype. IMO, no reason to get fancy here. as ctmccloskey said, use what the car was designed with.

84 4+3

Johnson controls is 1 of 5 or so battery manufacturers left. (They make Optima now) Its them, deka, Duracell, and a couple others that make the boutique ones like odyssey, exide and XS. My walmart battery experience was it lasted 12 years in my boats. 6 of those years were behind diesels and the other 6 behind a carbuerated 3.0l...

As for the walmart cranking longer than an Optima, the legacy spiral of the battery pack limits capacity. If you ever look an Optima is rated at only 1/2-2/3 or so of the group size flooded it replaces as far as reserve capacity is concerned. That is a function of the cell geometry.

Mine has a regular flooded battery in it from advanced. It is good enough. My daily has the Optima because of the inverters and accessories I run.

cv67

84 4+3 not sure I understand your post but the CCA of both the optima and wally battery were close to the same. (no clue what reserve means) So why would the traditional battery not get run down as quick, something about the design sounds like?

Seems once they Optimas Ive had get run down they never seen to take a good charge again.

Also, what about those smaller lightweight batteries, wouldnt mind cutting some weight but not if theres risk of problems with hot restarts, reliable enough for a street car?

84 4+3

The reserve is how long the battery can discharge at a given rate for. Generally my experience with Optima has been the top post ones are good but the side post ones never cranked as well as a flooded one. Mainly because the Optima is rated at its higher float voltage which you don't get from an alternator. (I may have that backwards but iirc agm floats higher.)

The traditional battery has more plate surface area which equates to higher capacity. The spiral in the Optima which gives it its vibration resistance lowers how long it can be discharged for. Nothing crazy.

By smaller/lighter you mean lithium? That's a whole can of worms but basically, they like to be charged then not charged. Which poses problems in automotive applications where load is ever changing. Remember the phones bursting into flames, picture a battery 3x that size under your hood. Plus they don't like temp swings and cold weather as they can hit thermal run away and over heat.

ctmccloskey

I am not sure what nut came up with the idea of putting the battery in the HOT dirty environment like under the hood of a car. "Heat" is the worst enemy of most batteries. If you keep them cooler they will last a lot longer. The one in my C3 is behind the drivers seat and I have insulated the box to keep it nice and cool.

Optima makes "special" battery chargers for their products. I spoke to one of their techs and he suggested that I use a battery in between the Red Top and the Charger to charge my Red Top fully. From this information I would suspect that their battery does not like the AC ripple that gets through on some of the less expensive battery chargers. They do have some interesting peculiarities for a battery sold as a "universal replacement" for automotive use.

Johnson Controls makes some great batteries. Exide is another company who makes a great product and their quality control is very good. I bought an EverReady battery once (@ Costco) for my C3 and it was dead in less than 12 months, beware of cheap batteries.

Ihatebarkingdogs, That is the unusual for your batteries to fail that quickly. My son has a 2004 Volkswagen Passat and I changed the battery when it was over 12 years old, it was a VARTA brand battery but it was the original that came with the car. VARTA makes VERY good products and will last if taken care of. My son's VW also had a cover over the entire battery to insulate it from the heat under the hood. The same with a VW Camper I had many years ago, the battery was inside an insulated chamber away from engine heat.

I have a Lithium Ion Ferrous battery in my Motorcycle, my bike has no electric starter so it is small. The standard Yuasa battery was close to 8 pounds or something, the new battery weighs less than 2 pounds charged up and ready to roll. On the flip side, the charger built into the bike can't charge it properly so every so often I hook it up to their proprietary charger (which cost more than the battery did).

Do not buy batteries based on their warranties! The whole warranty game is a joke. They sell the exact same product with a longer warranty and it usually works out better for the battery manufacturer than the customer. I wish somebody made a good flooded battery that you could rebuild and replace parts in it as needed. I love how some batteries look the same but have different ratings, the reason is they use heavier interconnecting parts within the battery allowing it to handle a bit more current. Frequently they will have the same innards and heavier connections.

cuisinartvette, Trickle charging a battery is not necessarily a bad thing, you just need to be sure that you do not over charge the battery and dry it out. I had that happen to a battery I had that I left on a trickle charger for a few weeks and when I looked in the battery the electrolyte had boiled away allowing the plates to be exposed. Any time the plates get exposed damage is done to the plate that is frequently irreversible. The trickle chargers I bought at harbor freight would not stop when the battery was close to full charged, they just kept pouring 1 amp into a battery 24/7 and I would recommend that people stay away from those unless you attach it to a timer and run it for a few hours a week while the battery not in use. Cheaper chargers might have more AC ripple in them which FLA batteries really don't care for.

Where people get in trouble is just hooking any old charger to your battery and forgetting about it, some chargers (the more expensive ones) are designed to charge the battery in stages and they will generally keep your battery ready to go and not over charge the battery. I have a special charger that goes through several steps to ensure the battery is charged properly. I also have an old Montgomery Wards 10 amp charger, when monitoring it the charger pushed the voltage up to close to 17 Volts and then started tapering down. That was fine on a FLA but don't ever charge an Optima or any other technology batteries with these old chargers. 17 Volts is way too high for some of today's FLA batteries even. I like to see a FLA battery charged up to 14.7 maybe 14.8 volts and tapered down from there. The higher the voltage it stays at increases the amount of electrolyte it will boil away causing it to dry out and destroy the battery it was supposed to help.

I hope that this helps a bit! Have a great day!
Chris a.k.a. ctmccloskey

cv67

Helps a lot thanks! Had also heard about not using a std charger on the optima so bought a trickle charger that shuts off when its topped off. I used it once on this walmart battery as I let the car sit for the better part of a year after I bought it and one afternoon had cranked on it quite a bit. So far its holding. May give it a try on the daily and watch the amps gauge, cold weather seem to affect the first start of the day.

ctmccloskey

If there is "Only" one warranty (with 2 years of free replacement) out there how did you manage to get three years on the Bosch battery?

I have 8 vehicles that use batteries and I don't replace them very often as I take care of them after putting them in service. My RV storage batteries (FLA) are over 9 years old, funny thing, I water them and clean them regularly. By they way they are INTERSTATE batteries as well.

A battery was not designed to be a "buy it and forget it part" but actually needs maintenance and on a regular basis. When did you last service your battery? Check the electrolyte?

I do not believe that there has been any significant difference in the battery quality of the standard FLA batteries used in cars. Today the batteries are more expensive as I mentioned earlier because they want the end user to pay part of the recycling cost of the materials. They are using more recycled materials than ever but I have seen nothing to make me think that they are designing them to live long enough to be out of warranty. The batteries today are made the same way they were made in the 1960's and 1970's. We just use them differently. The better quality FLA batteries will last just as long as they did decades ago "IF" they are taken care of and maintained properly. Subject any FLA battery to these higher under hood temperatures along with starting every couple minutes in town and we would expect them to live shorter lives.

Cars today all seem to run hotter than in the old days right? This is FACT, car engines run hotter to get cleaner emissions. HEAT is a killer of batteries and will shorten their life. Where are 99% of all the newer batteries located? The Under the hood temperatures are higher today than they ever have been. Ever heard the term "Heat Soak"? Every time you drive your car and then park it the battery is getting cooked. During the summer those batteries are hurting already but then you add 200 degree operating temperatures the life will naturally be shorter.

"Extreme heat can lead to battery corrosion that shortens the average car battery life"

"Heat and Batteries. ... Heat can also cause battery fluids to evaporate, which can cause damage to the internal structure of the battery as well. In fact, according to the Car Council, the two main reasons that battery lives are shortened are hot weather and overheating."
There is a lot on the web about batteries and heat.

Before you blame the battery look where it is located. Our newest vehicle shuts off the engine at every stop, then starts it back up when the light turns green, How can a battery last longer in any new car that works it twice as hard? Some engine compartments get well over 300 degrees after shutting down the engine and that poor little battery is just roasting and being destroyed.

My daughter has a 2011 Camaro with the original battery located in the trunk of the car from the manufacturer, it is 7 years old and working just great. I tested it last summer and it still has over 80% of the original rated power. My C3 batteries regularly last way more than five years do to the fact that the battery doesn't get hot. I know lots of folks who have five and six year battery lives, most of them have cars where the battery is not subjected to the heat of the under-hood area.

Good Luck and maintain all the parts of the car including the battery!

RtStuf

ctmccloskey
Do you think a battery insulator would be of any benefit to extending the life of FLA battery?

ctmccloskey

I worked for my whole career building solar systems. I started building large Photo-voltaic Solar systems that were hybrids using multiple sources of power to charge our batteries. I was the "In-House" expert on the batteries and have been listed as such by the Dept. of Energy and several national laboratories. We used hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of batteries per year and I had to test every type before they were used by my fellow engineers in real world applications. These batteries were placed out in deserts and on remote islands where there was no power available. I was the person who developed the charging algorithms that were used in our computerized control systems to ensure that we got the maximum life out of the products we used. I was also listed an "expert" regarding wind turbines, Diesel generators and Remote Village Power Systems. I have brought electrical power and running water to several villages in parts of the remote world. The batteries I was working with were "Mission Critical" and I had to be absolutely sure I was charging them the most efficient way. I am also a published author on remote power systems. Enough about me and what I have done, I used my battery knowledge to bring lights into homes in some pretty desolate places and I feel good for having done so.

I have not seen any "Maintenance Free" FLA battery that had no way of accessing the cells electrolyte levels. They put labels on the covers sometimes (to discourage people from maintaining the product) but I have always been able to add distilled water to the cells. Charge indicators are a joke and about as accurate as most automotive gauges. Besides if you are color-blind they are useless. I am color blind.....

To properly take care of a battery I remove the battery from the vehicle and put it on my workbench. Then I inspect the case closely for any evidence of plate growth or any defects like cracks. After this I clean the entire battery down with a baking soda mixture (with distilled water) that neutralizes any electrolyte on the outside of the case. Next I clean the terminals or posts on the battery. After that I open the battery up exposing the electrolyte levels. I will then read the specific gravity and verify that it is close on all six cells and I then add distilled water to bring the electrolyte up to the level indicators inside the battery. A good solid charge is next using a special battery charger I have that uses Constant Current (CC) and Constant Voltage (CV) to ensure that the battery is fully charged. Then the battery gets wiped down with the baking sodas and water to neutralize anything that splashed out while charging without the caps on the cells. Then I go back and check the specific gravity again to be sure that the battery is really fully charged. The caps are reinstalled and the battery terminals are greased and the battery is ready to go back in the car or to my winter charging bench where they will be maintained by a weekly charging session done using a timer.

If you have been working with Deep Cycle storage batteries all these years what have you been doing with the instructions that come with the batteries? I guess you skimmed those as well, that is not good for your customers...

Antimony, gee I am impressed. How much antimony is in your average FLA car battery, how about your storage battery? I spent years working with the manufacturers learning their secret recipes and I am familiar with what happens when you have too much or too little. Are you familiar with the other types of batteries as well? If you are so smart what type of large storage battery would you recommend for my 36' boat? What brand do you favor and why? I am a gentleman and have agreements with many of the battery companies that I will not share any of their secrets. When you buy a lot of batteries it is amazing what they will tell you and what you learn. I personally would prefer a lead selenium battery over any antimony based battery, why?

The flooded lead acid battery has changed little since Edison was messing with them. There are several ways to make plates for batteries today. Not one manufacturer that I know here in the United States has admitted to changing the chemistry of their products just to make them wear out in two years. If you are still experiencing shorter than normal battery lives it must be something that you are doing, don't blame the battery.

An FLA battery can boil off electrolyte at 14.7 when it is near fully charged. It is "normal" for a battery to use electrolyte, that is why I replenish it.

ctmccloskey

Hello RtStuf

If you could insulate the battery from the surrounding heat your battery will definitely last longer. I tried this in my C3 where I had this big compartment with the battery mounted inside it. I use the same materials I had leftover from sealing the floor off of the car to deaden to sound and block the heat. The material I had was nice as it had a reflective heat barrier built in. My box surrounds the battery but leaves air movement over it and around it.

I hope this helps a bit. Have a great day!

mickey5

The problem with modern batteries is not so much their design but where the auto mfr puts them. In order to service the C4 battery I have to remove it from the car to reach cap located closest to the engine to add distilled water. After 28 years I'm on my 3rd AC Delco from taking delivery in 1990. The first one lasted 12 years. The secret is constant use of a maintainer.

ctmccloskey

Mickey5 you are absolutely right! If the battery is kept fully charged all the time it rarely looses capacity like those that are cycled hard and left partially charged. They need to find a way to keep the battery cooler by re-locating it to a safe location away from heat. Actually I have wondered why the auto manufacturers let the under the hood temperatures get so bloody high today in the first place. A lot of parts are getting damaged every day from "Heat Soaking" with these ridiculous under the hood temps. It damages far more than just the battery.

With the self discharge of the FLA batteries being higher than other batteries it is wise to keep a good maintainer on the battery when not in use. There are maintainers out there that will float your battery after it reaches a full charge. I bought a cheap one and it left my battery dry by springtime and I had to buy another battery. The maintainer I bought was advertised it to be a "1 amp battery maintainer" and it was just that, 1 amp at 12 Vdc continuously 24/7 no matter what the battery voltage was.
The battery left un-attended for the winter months will loose charge continuously due to the self discharge eating away at the battery. When you charge it up in the spring it may be too late as the capacity has been reduced by sulfation of the plate surface that was not fully charged. Some sources even suggest that the self-discharge rate of a FLA battery is more like 5% per MONTH and it goes up on older batteries.

The self-discharge of all battery chemistries increases at higher temperature, and the rate typically doubles with every 10°C (18°F). A noticeable energy loss occurs if a battery is left in a hot vehicle. High cycle count and aging also increase self-discharge of all systems.

Before you use the battery when the weather warms up be sure to give it a full charge on a regular charger to de-stratify the electrolyte. To de-stratify the electrolyte you need to charge it a high enough rate to get it bubbling.
"Acid stratification cannot always be avoided. During cold winter months, starter batteries of most passenger cars dwell at a 75 percent charge level. Knowing that motor idling and driving in gridlocked traffic does not sufficiently charge the battery; charge the battery occasionally with an external charger. If this is not practical, switch to an AGM battery. AGM does not suffer from acid stratification and is less sensitive to sulfation if undercharged than the flooded version. AGM is a bit more expensive than the flooded version but the battery should last longer." this was taken from the "Battery University" on the web.

Good Luck My Fellow Corvette Enthusiasts!

cv67

Good point on heat, MB figured that one out a long time ago.
Daily (truck) goes through a battery a year, avg since new. Same with the pcm, fuse boxes love heat and grease too!