watered batteries after three weeks of Eternal Absorption

I normally water every couple of couple of months, but thought it would be smart to check early this time just in case I was boiling off a ton of water.

The water use was in line with what I normally see.  I got a couple bloops out of each cell, with the exception of one cell that took 4 bloops.  Misfilled before?  Venting more?

WAG

I have two wild-ass guesses as to why:

1.  atmospheric conditions have been so bad I actually haven’t been spending that much time in Absorption :-(; and/or

2. maybe electrolysis is a function of current and voltage, and not just voltage.  In other words, maybe long periods of absorption with relatively little current just don’t gas that much.   Hmmm.

reading

I started googling the topic and here are the first few resources I found.

From this quote:

> Increasing the voltage/current and higher ambient temperatures accelerate this outgassing

… which seems to suggest that current is a partial factor.

And this one:

> IEEE 484 is the standard governing the installation practices for lead-acid batteries and it states that.... [the] worst-case condition exists when forcing maximum current into a fully charged battery...

… which suggests current is the culprit.    It also holds this image:

This page has a formula for calculating outgassing, and  one factor (G) is:

> Volume of hydrogen produced by one ampere hour of charge.

Voltage does not appear in the formula.

tentative conclusion

I assumed that extended absorption would increase ougassing linearly, ie, 3 hrs would outgas _X _ml and 6 hours would outgas 2_X _ml, leading to the need for greater attention to water levels.  That does not appear to be the case either in my experiment or in the literature.

I am not a chemist and this is just one datapoint, so it will be interesting to see where it leads.