"So a hundred bucks or so for a bit of extra life out of your $5000 set of batteries is a pretty good deal."
maybe! maybe not!
do they sell these desulfators? or sell the plans for them?
if so i am very suspicious of their report.
Aha! I've stumbled upon your pet rant it seems.
They don't sell the desulfators. They give way the plans for a basic desulphator. They are a privately-funded rainforest research station.
can you link directly to their article?
i really don't want to spend half the night trying to find it only to find what i usually find in these desulfator reports, that is poor science.
I gave you my reasons for not linking, but it's on that site I indicated. Look for yourself in the archives.
sulfation that has crystalized and hardened will form crystalls of differing sizes and mass, each of which would have to have a different frequency to get them to vibrate, that is if they could vibrate at all in a liquid bath, which would dampen them.
where a desulfator might have validity is in its ability to pulse higher voltages than normally used for equalization for very short durations, thus avoiding heat buildup.. maybe,, theoretical at best.
They have a few photos of plates under an electron microscope, but they state that the hows and whys are purely theoretical. That's why they tested them, silly. They were looking for hard data and the end result. Whether it actually twangs the crystals to shrink them, or little moon men are attracted to it and sneak in at night to file the sulphate crystals down for you, it doesn't matter in the end if the thing works, no?
so far i have seen no report, (and i have read many dozens over the years) that illustrate the mechanism of a desulfator working any better than careful charge regiimes and routine equalization, as far as good batteries go.
This is principally an area where "careful charge regimes" are not used. All the RAPS in use there are run by average people, who don't give a damn about equalisation or what-not. They just want their lights to work. This is a test of desulhpators in real-world, hit and miss use. They noted that there were some improvements in entire packs simply because people were aware that "technical people" were watching them, and they were then obliged to look after them a bit better. Putting the desulphator across half a bank allows them to take issues like that into account though.
if at the end the researcher was to retest the capacity of the two groups and found the desulfator group clearly of more capacity then maybe i would get on board,, until then no way.
They measured each cell's internal conductance monthly. This is a (but not "the") principle indicator of remaining plate life and general capacity. It's a bit hard to come up to someone - who volunteered - and say "Hey, I'm going to cycle your pack and interrupt your next couple of days power usage, so I can get some numbers for my report". Especially the kind of people living in that region. They prefer to be left alone.
The ones in the desuplhator group consistently indicated a higher conductance than the ones run normally. Well, that's what the scatter plot of 40 sets of cells in the report indicates anyway. The bulk of the samples were in the "better" section of the plot.
But hell, I'm going for a nickel-iron set in my RAPS, so sulphation can take a flying leap.