Resuscitating a Dead Odyssey 34R AGM? (1 Viewer)

[EricUT]

I have a dual Odyssey battery setup with a Redarc isolator and BCDC system. Worked great for about a year, zero issues, then I had to park the truck for a couple of months. I bought the $200+ Odyssey charger which was supposed to maintain that AGM perfectly, but instead of holding it at the 13.5v or whatever it was when i parked it, the charger seems to have completely killed the battery, and now i can't get it to take more than about 8.5-9.5v charge. Odyssey isn't being of any help at all btw, if you're interested here's my video of the deal i'll shamelessly put here - I'm pretty bummed. (I should say that I know some guys won't like that posted that. If you've had great luck with Odyssey I'm glad to hear it - but I wish someone had told me how bad their customer service is, so sharing my experience. It's great their products work when they work, but if you get a bad one like I did, you're on your own).

Anyway, that's a fair amount of money for me, so I can't easily just buy another. Are there any tricks I haven't tried? Here's what I've done so far:

1. Needless to say the Odyssey maintenance charger quit working, so that was step one
2. Next a tried a 12v-only charger, in case the Odyssey had somehow started thinking the battery was a six volt and started charging half way (still not sure that's not what happened).
3. Then I jumpered it to a fully charged 12v battery, per Odyssey's recommendation.
4. Finally, I ran it off that same 12v, with the dumb charger supporting it for 48 hours.

In all cases the battery gets to about 9.5v, quickly dropping to 8.5v, and won't go higher. Any other tricks to resurrect these things? I'm kinda stuck and i hate to take down the whole battery system to run an affordable lead acid for now. Help is welcome, i want my truck back!

 

[hoser]

When you "jumped" the battery, how long did you leave it on? Try going for an hour or so... checking progress along the way. Sometimes chargers won't charge batteries that are too low in voltage.

As a last ditch effort, also, search de-sulphating the battery.

 

[EricUT]

When you "jumped" the battery, how long did you leave it on? Try going for an hour or so... checking progress along the way. Sometimes chargers won't charge batteries that are too low in voltage.

As a last ditch effort, also, search de-sulphating the battery.

Thanks for the video. I'm learning more about lead batteries than i even knew and just came across de-sulphating doing a separate search, so sounds like I need to give that a shot for sure.
I had the jumpers on the two batteries for a long time - tried an hour at first, then extended to overnight, and finally did 48 hours just trying to make anything work. It does sound like sulfation is the culprit, so definitely worth investing in a desulfator to try. I think that's really what the conditioning and maintenance phases of the Odyssey charger were supposed to do, but my conclusion is that i either received a bad charger, or the battery had some sort of issue that prevented the charger/maintainer from doing what it was supposed to do.

 

[Hokie99]

I’ve been using CTEC chargers for years, treated me very well from boats to jet skis to trucks to golf carts. I’ve also used them to desulfate batteries to bring them back to life. Think I paid 60 bucks. You can use on AGM as well.