Battery Question (Wet Cell Car Batteries in Large Robot)

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I’ve recently finished compiling all the assorted parts i need for a large scale robot driven by 2 wheel chair motors.

Someone I know with a solar setup was willing to give me two free SLA car batteries I figured would work, since I’ve seen plenty of electric forklifts with the water filled SLAs on them.

But while searching to try and figure out how many Amp Hours the batteries are, since they are only rated in Cold Cranking Amps, I saw several articles, blogs and forum posts where people are saying to not use that type of battery and to instead get the AGM gel type.

I’m not worried about leakage and won’t be going All-Terrain at least with this iteration. I already looked into AGM batteries and had several picked out but figured my friend had saved me a couple hundred dollars I would have to spend on a large capacity series.

My question is if these batteries are completely un-usable for some reason?

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HI @Pbetme!

As far as I know, gel type batteries are better because you can mount it in direction you want. You cannot do that with standard lead acid with water.

But generally, these car batteries are not suitable for robotics. They are not designed to be discharged all the way down, and they are not suitable for a lot of charging cycles.

That’s why lithium batteries are much better.

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