Thread: D3 battery

Originally Posted by PeterOZ

right oh I'll try to put a post up with hope I wont get berated again....

The battery in my old D3 is well past its use by date and only keeps going with weekly top ups via my 5A CTEK charger and 35km commute to and from work.

Get regular "Special programs not available" and recentlyI get "transmission fault, reduced traction" faults. Latter can be cleared by doing clutch sensor and range sensor calibration routines, drives fine with no fault until I stop and re-start at which point I am surmising the battery volts go too low and upset the little ones and zeros in the ECUs.

Current battery is a Bosch of 800CCA I think it is, its about 7 years old so have got my moneys worth.
I am looking to go to a spec of battery with similiar CCA of original battery, 900CCA.

Question for the wise: Can a AGM be used in a D3? I don't think there is anything in the CCF about letting it know its an AGM like the D4 has.
Not sure if a D3 voltage regulator is designed to be able to regulate and charge an AGM style battery??


I'm looking at the Delkor AGM (DIN85LH) 12V 900cca Battery

Not cheap at around $509.

Or they have a Calcium version of same specs ~ $290

Apart from price any pros / cons of either type?

Look forward to positive responses.
thanks in advance.
P

I have had the calcium version sine August 2017 (2.5 years) and it's still going strong. We do quite a bit of start-stop inside 10 mins too. It was recommended to me by Roversmith. I decided on the calcium rather than AGM due to price. From my experience

Originally Posted by INter674

Last one lasted 10 years and you can imagine the torrid treatment a tractor battery gets.

So what's so wrong with a simiar basic battery design for a car?

As Tombie said, it's a little more complex.

The Supercharge MF88h is somewhere around 100Ah and 900CCA (two completely different things).

My last one was replaced as while we were away camping, my young lad kept getting into and out of the car. Each time he opened the door it woke the vehicle up and a freshly woken D3 draws 10's of amps. A couple of these cycles and it would no longer start the car. When it was charged up there was no issues.

I did a capacity and load test and while it was still > 700CCA it was down to some ~21Ah capacity. So below a quarter of it's new capacity. Still had no issues in the car provided there wasn't a lot of use between stop and start.

Older tractors don't tend to have the higher electrical load, and I'm sure if I didn't have the 3 year old wanting to "drive" the car so often I'd probably have managed nearly another 2 years from the battery.

Modern batteries need both low internal resistance at low temperatures (high CCA) *and* high "RC" (Reserve Capacity or another way of expressing the Ah capacity but different). Traditional batteries with high cranking amps have lots of thin plates, and batteries with high capacity have fewer thick plates. Modern batteries are a complex trade-off between the two and things like glass mat or spiral wound are an attempt to allow thick plates that don't eject their coating when massive loads are put on them while still being fit for purpose and not shaken to pieces with rough physical treatment. In there is also the chemistry which affects voltage and the ability to accept charge (charging rate). Older "simple" batteries just can't be recharged as fast as the modern chemistry. You can force more current through them, but the lead only converts at a limited rate, the rest is dissipated as heat and dissociating the electrolyte.

A tractor is a pretty benign environment by comparison unless you are talking about the relatively new "all singing and dancing, electric automated marvels".

It's complicated.