battery insulation

Have a look at these products
thermo tek

good point shane,

this has crossed my mind before too.
But considering the thermal mass of lead 33 times lower than water, I suppose you could think of your battery like a full 1.25l bottle of coke in terms of passive heat/temperature properties. For AGM designs that is. Flooded batteries have higher overall thermal mass due to the additional amount of water.
The smaller the thermal mass, the steeper the temperature will rise at a certain amount of heating.
For this reason, lead acid batteries probably show an unexpectedly fast rising temperature when heat is added from the outside (or from the inside...).

Now this insulation will work both ways, effectively keeping any heat trapped inside the battery for longer.
If the charging is not 100% matched to the battery, there will almost certainly be some heat generation inside the battery.
It would be interesting to find out, if this negative affect will outweigh the benefits of your proposed battery heat insulator.

Not knowing which way the heat will flow through the insulation, the best thing you can achieve is good ventilation of the space around your battery.
And make absolutely sure no hot air from the radiator will be directed towards it.

Best regards, batterymeister

Might be useful (hope link works) http://neuralfibre.com/paul/4wd/battery-heat-shields-for-my-hzj105

I remember the old Jag XJ12's didn't have a lot of room under the bonnet and to keep the battery at a reasonable temperature they had a small fan next to the battery.

Maybe a computer fan drawing cooler air from the front of the vehicle and blowing through some ducting towards the battery would help.

Dave

Hi Shane

You can't really stop general heat build up other than ventilation but you can stop radiated heat which does help a lot, especially if the battery is on the exhaust side of the engine.

If you do a search for battery cover, battery saver and cell saver you will find a few on the web.

Here is our one.



Regards

Derek from ABR

Attaching some insulation to a battery would be very cheap - do you wonder why you never see it in a car ???

Heat shields allowing air to circulate around the battery and take away heat - yes.

Insulation preventing heat escape - NO.

A few years ago i use to work on taxis and on falcons some of the things we would do are,
Move factroy auto cooler to powersteering and fit large cooler to auto.

Fit 2.5" hose to battery case,to direct coolair around battery.This increased the life of the battery.

OK, read all the comments and come to the conclusion that I need to put a shield up from radiator to past battery and up to bonnet. vent air in front and use computer fan for extraction.

My reason for this is my battery seems to loose water all the time. have checked charging etc. and monitor it from in cab. I know its spot on.(this is the second battery im talking about)
Its not uncommon for the patrol to run for thirty hours straight and being turbo it gets quite hot that side, so I think this is my problem.

cheers shane.