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From: (no name) (no email)
Date: Wed Apr 18 2007 - 10:04:05 EDT
In a message dated 4/18/07 12:01:05 AM, Marin writes:
> Point of interest, but nobody's going to be flying a floatplane in
> -20F or -30F weather. :-) A skiplane, yes.
>
> In addition to removing the battery and taking it inside, the pilots
> would also heat the engine oil the next morning. This was commonly
> done by draping a tarp or engine cover over the front of the plane to
> make a sort of tent and then putting a kerosene or oil heater on the
> ground under the nose of the plane. If this wasn't done it didn't
> matter how good the battery was, it wasn't going to turn the engine
> over fast enough to start it if indeed it turned the engine over at
> all. So the batteries actually weren't having to work any harder
> than usual. But if they were left in the plane, even with the oil
> heated up the pilots said the battery wouldn't start the plane.
>
> So extremely cold weather must reduce a wet-cell battery's
> performance by some degree otherwise generations of pilots wouldn't
> have been taking their batteries inside every night. A job that, by
> the way, is a giant pain the butt. If they thought they could get
> away without doing it they wouldn't have done it.
>
>
No floatplane or skiplane experience here, but during my stint in the
military I was stationed at Ft. Churchill, CA over a very cold winter. The
temperature would drop to -50 degrees overnight. We used battery heaters,
essentially a
heating pad wrapped around the battery, and engine block warmers to get our
vehicles started after being parked in the cold. If you neglected to plug in,
forget about using your vehicle until spring. Taking the battery inside might
have helped but our 8D truck batteries weighed 150 lbs.
Anyway, the discussion seems to have mutated from cold storage of batteries
to cold weather starting. For what it's worth, our fully charged truck and
tank
batteries did not freeze and restarted the vehicle reliably when warmed up. I
don't know of any boat storage venue in the contenental US where the winter
temperature would get cold enough to fatally damage a fully charged lead/acid
battery.
Larry Z
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