Can You Trust a Reconditioning Kit?

The reconditioning kit is widely advertised today online and offline. Most of us own multiple products that require expensive batteries. Cell phone and laptops are common products that lead us to look for ways to renew an old battery or at least add a few months of life to a waning battery pack.

Most battery reconditioning kids are focused on car batteries. With newer lithium ion batteries, reconditioning is a simple process. There are recommendations for placing the battery in your freezer for hours prior to charging and other recommendation to fully discharge the battery and recharge completely a few times to restore the "memory" of the battery.

When it comes to lead acid batteries, consumers are interested in ways to prolong the life of a car, boat or camper battery.

Expensive

Replacement is expensive and discarded batteries are a recognized danger to the environment. The chemicals from discarded batteries can leech into the ground, add fumes to the air and can kill wildlife.

Part of the problem of discarding old batteries is finding a disposal company that will accept them. You may store old batteries in your garage for years trying to find a safe and inexpensive way to disposed of them.

If you sell the house and leave batteries behind, the new owner may just toss them into regular garbage where they will leak acid into landfills.

Too often, the difficulty of disposal leads people to toss old batteries by the side of the road or disguise them as household waste in a garbage bag.

The Way to Go?

There are professional kits on the market. The cost of such a kit is too high for most homeowners but has led to a cottage industry of entrepreneurs who recondition batteries for a living.

They may recondition your battery for a fee or may sell batteries they have accumulated and successfully renewed.

If your goal is to recondition your own car battery you may look at various websites offering cheap kits for sale. For the most part, this is not a safe or effective way to save money on batteries.

The chemicals in such kits are often produced in China where the manufacturing standards are low. The stability of the chemicals is questionable and the instructions may not be sufficient for the average handyman.

Though you can buy such a reconditioning equipment for as little as $30, you will need other accessories. For example, reconditioning an auto battery requires a voltmeter, battery load tester, wire probes, hydrometer, etc.

In addition you must wear protective clothing, goggles and gloves when using chemical additives and acids. Experts recommend wearing a respirator when handling these chemicals as they can be extremely volatile and create toxic fumes.

An Alternative

For the average person, the best alternative to a reconditioning equipment is a well written book that clearly describes how to renew and recondition old batteries of all types.

When written by a professional in the field, such a book can help you choose which batteries you can easily recondition at home and which battery types are too dangerous to work with.

Good batteries will last for several years and it's natural for them to eventually become useless in holding a charge. There are ways to recondition batteries to extend their useful life but a dead battery is... dead.

When it comes to batteries that commonly include heavy metals and caustic chemicals, don't rely on a cheap kit without thought about safety factors involved.