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Recondition or reuse end-of-life SLA batteries from a UPS?

baldengineer

12V Sealed Lead Acid Battery

I realize the irony of asking this question.

If a sealed lead acid (SLA) battery is at the end of its life, then it is done, right?

I have at least six 1500 VA uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units throughout my lab, studio, and house. Each UPS has two 12 volt batteries, so I have at least two batteries total. They're slowly starting to fail because the supervisor circuit has decided the batteries are at the end of their life. (Well, in fairness, they probably are!) Fortunately, drop-in replacements exist, so I can keep the UPS units running with a swap. $150 to replace all the batteries or $1200+ for new units. (Even with 2 hours of my inflated labor charge, that is a decent saving!)

Anyway.

While I'm sure they can no longer provide 10s of amps to a load, I expect they can work as a decent low-current battery backup option for one-off IoT stuff.

Is there anything I can do to recondition these batteries? Or do I just accept their current ESR and deal with it?

Or do I just take them to the recycling center and not even bother?

What would you do?

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  • I'm going to have to try this, open it up.  Carefully of course, bad acid to deal with. 

    I inherited a nice UPS that didn't charge the batteries.  It had six 12V SLA batteries in it.  I pulled it apart and found the one bad battery, tried to bring it back to life with an automotive battery charger.  That didn't work.  But now I have 5 (mostly?) good batteries.  I put one in my cheaper under-desk UPS when that battery failed.  Now I have 4 good SLA setting there, probably slowly going bad.  Yes, I could buy 2 new batteries, but the six battery UPS was way too loud to use in my home.

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  • I'm going to have to try this, open it up.  Carefully of course, bad acid to deal with. 

    I inherited a nice UPS that didn't charge the batteries.  It had six 12V SLA batteries in it.  I pulled it apart and found the one bad battery, tried to bring it back to life with an automotive battery charger.  That didn't work.  But now I have 5 (mostly?) good batteries.  I put one in my cheaper under-desk UPS when that battery failed.  Now I have 4 good SLA setting there, probably slowly going bad.  Yes, I could buy 2 new batteries, but the six battery UPS was way too loud to use in my home.

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