Battery reversed polarity

[grsthegreat]

Ok, heres a real strange one.

I have a AGM battery for my Cyclone Rake. I remove it every year for winter. Last winter i forgot to place it on a trickle charger midway thru winter like i usually do.

Come spring, i tried hooking it up to my Noco battery charger and it says i have cables on backwards. But i dont.

I place it aside and just use the cyclone rake with pull start. So this fall i get back to studying the battery. I confirm its reversed polarity with my fluke meter. Online is not much help. One site suggested totally draining battery and try recharging it.

I hooked it up to 12 v light and ran all night. Next day i place it on charger and the Noco proceeded to try and charge it, but the battery began to smoke. Luckily i hung around to watch it.

I unhooked it and ordered a new battery. Ill toss this one, but still wondering what caused it to reverse polarity

 

[mrmikey]

I've heard of that happening if the battery is allowed to go stone dead.

 

[grsthegreat]

I've heard of that happening if the battery is allowed to go stone dead.

But it wasnt stone dead, it ran the 12v lights for quite some time.

 

[rScotty]

But it wasnt stone dead, it ran the 12v lights for quite some time.

Incandescent lights are a purely resistive load. They don't care about polarity. All of your non-led type lights will light up regardless of polarity. That means that incandescent lights can get some useful amps out of an otherwise stone dead battery that is so flat hat the polarity has reversed....which does happen.

But everything else in your tractor charging system does require the proper polarity, and so do most 110 volt chargers today. Either one will detect the polarity reversal and refuse to charge.

 

[grsthegreat]

Ya, it started to smoke when placed on charger. Going to dump. I bought a new one on amazon.

 

[ultrarunner]

It was user error with the old positive ground cars in that owners had no idea they were charging the wrong way and often the battery was dead dead after a long slumber.

 

[Jstpssng]

I had something even stranger happen. I was at the site of an old logging camp years ago and picked up a piece of wire which was next to where the generator shed had been. For some reason I decided to hold it against my compass and the darned thing repelled the needle! I know that iron will affect compassing but have never seen it repelled... Before or since.

On another occasion I was out in the woods early one morning and took a compass shot to head east. That's odd, the sun doesn't rise in the west! For some reason my compass had reversed polarity. I was wearing a snowboarding coat which had magnets to hold the zipper flap shut and I probably had hit it on that.

If it had been a cloudy day I might have walked a long ways in the wrong direction.