Did you know many of the “bad” batteries returned to retailers are really just deeply-discharged and work fine, when properly-recharged?  Unfortunately, many battery chargers simply will not work on batteries that have been discharged below a minimum voltage level, which can be as high as 10.5 volts!

OPTIMA’s new Digital 1200 12-volt battery charger can recover many deeply-discharged batteries, including batteries discharged all the way down to 1.25 volts!  That’s great news for any battery owner, but what if you don’t own one of these chargers yet?

There are some other methods for recovering deeply-discharged batteries and we decided to create a YouTube video, which explains the options most consumers have in recovering deeply-discharged batteries.  Be sure to check it out, because the few minutes you spend watching that video could end up saving you time and money that might otherwise be spent buying a new battery.

Have you heard of Pinterest yet?  If not, let us bring you up to speed.  Pinterest is a site for sharing photos and originally became very popular with women.  While that is still the case, an increasing number of men are signing up. Why would men care about new hairstyles, favorite recipes or fashion tips?  They may not, but Pinterest has plenty of photos that interest men as well.

We signed up a while back and we’ll admit, we’re pretty addicted to it.  Pinterest allows you to create your own cyber bulletin boards, where you can “pin” your favorite pictures.  OPTIMA now has 14 such boards, each dedicated to something different.

If you want to see photos of vehicles from SEMA, we have a board dedicated to it.  The same is true for drag racing, open road and salt flat racing, boat racing and tournament fishing, off road, road racing and autocross racing and a board that shows our favorite places to do all of that stuff and more.  We even have boards set up just for station wagons, red vehicles, yellow vehicles and blue vehicles!  If users find a board they like, they can follow updates to that board or every board from that user.

Pinterest also has an app that allows you to view photos on your smart phone.  Stuck at a doctor’s office with a stack of Ladies Home Journal and National Geographic and not a hot rod magazines in sight?  Open up your Pinterest app and start browsing photos of the most-amazing vehicles on the planet.  If you have a thing for non-Cobra Jet ’69 Mercury Cyclones, search for those and start pinning them to your own board.  If you still aren’t convinced, check out OPTIMA’s pinboards and see if there aren’t more than a few photos that appeal to you.  Once you check it out, we think you’ll get hooked!  Once you sign up, be sure to follow a few of our boards, so you’ll know what is going on in the world of OPTIMA.

Unfortunately, the story behind this Group D27M BlueTop is a familiar one.  It’s owner contacted us, frustrated with the performance of his battery.  Even though the battery was well outside of warranty coverage, it’s owner felt OPTIMA owed him some sort of resolution, because he couldn’t get the battery to charge above 12.5 volts.

The best we could offer was to send him another battery that we knew tested good, but also had no warranty, in exchange for his battery.  When his old battery arrived, it sat under a desk for almost a week, before we had a chance to check and charge it. Surprisingly, the battery measured 12.57 volts, even though the owner claimed he couldn’t get his charger to charge it up to 12.5 volts.

After measuring the initial voltage, we connected it to the OPTIMA Digital 1200 battery charger. With one touch convenience, the charger went to work, recharging the battery.  A few hours later, the voltage measured a solid 13.02 volts, well within the range of what would be considered acceptable for this battery.  Is the OPTIMA Digital 1200 a miracle worker for batteries?  While it is capable of charging batteries that have been deeply-discharged down to 1.25 volts, it may not have performed any miracles on this battery.

The pre-charge voltage indicated the battery likely had more voltage than the owner realized.  If that is the case, it would be the second time in the last two weeks that we’ve heard from someone who was getting incorrect voltage readings on their battery.  If it did recover a battery that the original owner couldn’t manage to charge properly, then the OPTIMA Digital 1200 battery charger could have already paid for itself with one use, as a new D27M BlueTop will run $254.99 at shop.optimabatteries.com before a $25 mail-in rebate, while the OPTIMA Digital 1200 battery charger is only $199.99.

In hindsight, we wished we had tried to first recharge the battery with a regular battery charger, just to see if the owner was getting incorrect voltage readings.  Either way, it is a good idea to check the voltage before and after charging, to make sure the battery charger is doing it’s job and if the voltage readings seem unusual, that the volt meter is doing it’s job.

We’ve been spending a little time “way out West,” as Sam Elliott’s character liked to say in The Big Lebowski. The reason for our trip to Southern California is to film some new Tech Tip videos for our YouTube channel, including some new videos that highlight OPTIMA’s new Digital 1200 12-volt battery charger.

The charger itself is quite impressive and has a lot of thoughtful features just not found on most other products.  Some of our favorites include no-spark connectivity and reverse polarity protection, which are fantastic safety features we think every charger should have.  We also like the LED light on the positive charger clamp, which makes finding a solid ground in a dark engine compartment a much easier task.  The Digital 1200 will also charge batteries that have been deeply-discharged as far down as 1.25 volts! (most chargers won’t charge batteries discharged below 10.5 volts)

Perhaps one of the most-unique features on our Digital 1200 charger is the USB port. As we traveled out West, it seemed like every airport wall outlet between Milwaukee and Los Angeles had been commandeered by someone’s smart phone.  Many of the newest models have so many features, they have a hard time lasting a single day without needing to be recharged.  The USB charging port on the Digital 1200 will give those high-tech phone owners one more way to easily charge their phones, as well as tablets, cameras or any other electrical accessory that plugs into a USB port for charging.

The filming process, like all filming, often seems to involve a lot of hurrying up and waiting.  The crew are all seasoned pros, but as good as they are, none of them can keep train horns from sounding across the road or airplanes from taking off and landing at the nearby airport.  It seemed like nearly every time the Director was ready to begin filming again, a motorcycle would tear down the street or another train would cross a road and sound it’s horn. Oh well, that’s show business.

We’ll be sure to post our new Tech Tip videos on our YouTube channel as soon as they are ready.  If you want to see all the great features of our new Digital 1200 battery charger, but don’t want to wait for the video, buy your Digital 1200 charger today and we’ll ship it to you for free!

We love delving into our archives and finding some of our old commercials and promotional videos.  Last week, we posted a video from 1991 on our YouTube channel that featured OPTIMA batteries being shot with a hand gun and strapped into a paint shaker.  This week, we posted another video from 2000, where another RedTop was shot with a high-powered rifle.

While those commercials do a great job of illustrating the durability of an OPTIMA  Battery, they were not produced with the intent that others would attempt to duplicate what we did in those videos, as that is very dangerous and not recommended.  However, they are a lot of fun to watch and give us a great perspective as we watch our latest OPTIMA commercial, which also features a RedTop.  We hope you enjoy them too!