styropyro

battery testing

Added 2025-06-14 17:31:44 +0000 UTC

I bought a cheap car battery impedance meter from scamazon and its readings line up perfectly with what I calculated via measurements taken during the 100 car battery video. The most surprising part is that the 2 year old batteries measure nearly the same as the new ones. It seems that the old ones are only 5~10% worse, and some of that may just be due to corrosion on the terminals. I honestly expected the old ones to test much worse than that! They've been exposed to the elements outside for two years, and of course I dead shorted them a bunch of times in my video. I have been good at keeping them fully charged though, which apparently is what matters the most for storage.

The meter has also shown how temperature dependent the battery impedance is. The hotter the battery, the lower the impedance. That means my experiments will work the best when it's hot outside! Hopefully I get a nice heat wave for the bulk of my testing.

This little meter will also function as a great way to test my cables. Any slight cable issue will be very apparent when hooked up to a battery, so I'll be able to sniff out bad connections this way.

As I await my ridiculous orders of copper to arrive, I'll be doing some work on the light bulb video. Today I'll be building a couple fixtures that will hopefully keep the bugs out and allow me to attempt cooking with it.