I packed up all my gel cell batteries today and hauled them in to Challenger Battery in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
These are the guys who fixed my Optima YellowTop post for free. (Nice guys!)
They are going to charge/discharge and load-test my 18 Deka Dominators to give me a sense of "which are the good ones".
I am planning on stringing together the best ones in the Electro-Metro, keeping extras in the reserves, and recycling any really bad ones.
I also bought a waterbed today off Craigslist. It's the whole thing, including the waterbed heater, which I though would be useful as a winter battery warmer.
The rest of the waterbed is going towards a water conservation project at my house.
PS: The guy at challenger also asked if I was the guy who got the speeding ticket in the electric car that while back. Yes. Yes, I was.
EDIT:
Here's a photo of the waterbed heater. It's almost a PERFECT size for my "back seat" battery box.
I plugged it in to the Killawatt, and it did measure as a 300 watt heater.
The thermostat on it is adjustable between room temperature to about 100 degrees farenheight.
The power for the heater plugs in to thermostat unit, so it would be easy to pull off and wire it to a time instead, or possibly a different thermostat. 70 degrees is really more than needed for the batteries in the winter. They don't need to be room temperature, they just need to NOT be frozen!!!