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From the Rolls-Royce experimental archive: a quarter of a million communications from Rolls-Royce, 1906 to 1960's. Documents from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation (SHRMF).
Letter from Peto & Radford discussing car battery performance, charging rates, and over-charging issues.

Identifier  ExFiles\Box 54\1\  Scan046
Date  23th November 1925
  
PETO & RADFORD. CONTINUATION 2.


E.{Mr Elliott - Chief Engineer} Fowler Clark Esq., 23rd November 1925.


The points that you mention are extremely interesting and I am putting your letter up to our technical people and we will investigate it, and I am arranging, as you suggest, to have an Exide battery on my car to-day and will let you know if I can notice any difference.

Even if what you say is correct, other factors seem to level their life up pretty equally because we get lots of Exide batteries back here off Rolls Royce cars. Owners come to us to buy a P. & R.{Sir Henry Royce} battery as replacement thinking, perhaps, that the Exide has not lasted as long as it ought to have done and they will try another make and I have no doubt that Exide get just the same with people replacing our batteries with an Exide. We always open up these Exide batteries and have always found them done to death with over-charging.

I cannot quite see why you are afraid of reducing the charging rate, admittedly, if the head lamps are used you need a fairly high rate but I think they are used a very small portion of time, most of the cars' running is in the daylight when they get this high charging rate.

There was an arrangement in Brolt's set that normally the dynamo charged at half charge but when the head lamps were switched on they put on automatically up to full charge. We supplied many thousands of batteries for Brolt equipments and have had great satisfaction with them and the over-charging troubles were very small. Could you not arrange something on the same lines?

I will write you further when I have heard from the Works about this matter and when I have made my observations, and I note that you will write me when you have examined it further.


Yours sincerely,

G.R.N. Minchin


P.S. With regard to your point re acid circulation etc., I cannot say whether our arrangement of the separators is the same as that of the Exide. Do they put their ebonite separators in the
  
  


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