One of ‘my moments’ occurred when we had a flat battery in a friends Piper Archer, winters evening, stuck in remote airfield. We really needed to get back to base. So……we spied a car in the adjacent car park, found the driver, sourced a set of jump leads, brought car to aeroplane, and jump started it.
Worked a treat, and a bemused car driver left to relay the story over a pint in a bar somewhere….the day I…..
In my experience putting the battery on a normal trickle charger will keep it topped over winter.
I know that 24v has advantages but you can’t beat 12v for practicality. My plane has automotive terminals so pretty well any car battery will fit it in an emergency. An Optima AGM battery costs only about £160, and you get 850amp ccc off a 50ah battery. Its amazing how much extra you have to pay just to get a battery with different shaped terminals (whose idea was that anyway?).
I think the battery was marginal and yes the replacement starter drew a bit less current.
I got a partial refund on the starter, a long time later.
There is a lot of old stock sitting on aviation shelves…
Peter wrote:
In that case, it happened at Tarbes, at the Socata factory.
You were lucky so. Have had a battery failure at LFHO (1 hour flight from LFMA) and was helped by my maintenance facility, who was flying around in a Citation… With a startpac. That was a saturday before christmas, 5h by car, no life on the field.
Peter wrote:
They diagnosed a faulty starter motor and sold me another one for €1400,
!!
Was it really faulty or the diagnosis bad ?
Peter wrote:
But it did manage to just about start the engine at Tarbes.
Don’t understand: how could that be if the battery was flat ? The new starter needed less energy ?
How did you do then ?
In that case, it happened at Tarbes, at the Socata factory. They diagnosed a faulty starter motor and sold me another one for €1400, which (having been a roughly 10 year old stock, no grease) seized a few weeks later. But it did manage to just about start the engine at Tarbes. When I got back home the battery failed properly, was replaced with a Concorde, and I fitted a Skytec 149NL starter.
Unfortunately, there are many things which could ground your plane and result in huge hassles – unless you stick to flying between say Shoreham and Bembridge, or Le Touquet, as many do. So pilots who travel a lot to distant places need to have a very picky attitude to maintenance.
PetitCessnaVoyageur wrote:
How did you do then ?
Ask the waitress in the café 
@Peter wrote:
The Gill would fail suddenly, and in my case far away from home.
How did you do then ?
At a 4A charge current, the waitress will need to be giving you a lot more than just her time 
You are looking at 4 hours to top off a 15Ah TB20 battery.
BTW, Concorde batteries which fail the load test are still good for many more years for other stuff. Just run it through a reconditioning charger (like the CTEK one), find a UPS whose battery total adds up to 24V, bring out the wires, sit the battery next to it, and you have a really high capacity brand new UPS
Some recommend putting the battery on the reconditioning charger anyway, say at each Annual. It may well be a good idea but I still got 6 years out of my last one without doing that. And when it failed the load test it was still starting the plane perfectly using the high speed starter – which is how it should be. The Gill would fail suddenly, and in my case far away from home.
Exactly. And while you’re at the cafe being served by the waitress, a nice 4 A charger should serve the battery.
Personally, I would recommend spending more time with that waitress in the café, ( have a good sh—g,for example) then come back in a couple of hours when your battery has had time to recuperate , before flying off.
Av batteries do not take to kindly to going from nill to full 60 Amps and tend to get fried.
