A boiling battery is not a good thing

Well, what a mess. Hilma had been in storage for a about 6 weeks and feeling very left out of our life. That would soon be remedied as we were off to our nieces wedding, Janette was arranging all the flowers in the church so we would be with Hilma for 4 days – whooppee 🙂
The day before we were to set for the off for the long awaited wedding (and flower arranging fest) I collected Hilma from storage. Couldn’t quite put my finger on it but something didn’t ‘smell’ right. You know that feeling, you know something is going to go wrong, your just waiting for the little blighter to rear it’s ugly head and show you what. By the time I got her home I was pretty convinced that the time would be close and I would find out. Sure enough the next day when packing the smell was there again, I knew the smell – battery acid. ‘Don’t panic Mr Mannering, don’t panic’ (for those of us over 50 you’ll know what all that is about). My highly tuned earholes by now knew every sound that Hilma threw at me, I could hear something faintly bubbling, putting 2 and 2 together (I usually get 5) along with the battery acid smell I had narrowed it down to – yes you guessed it the leisure battery. Later the next day Janette mentioned she had heard an alarm going off – now I don’t know if that was the built in alarm on the battery panel or our CO2 alarm.
So we are 1 day off going to (the long awaited) wedding and flower arranging fest, not an awful lot of time to get this sorted, yes OK easy enough to find a battery but I had no idea how to get at them (one battery under each front seat). I remembered an ‘Our Tour‘ post where Jay had some battery problem and saw that the whole seat had to come out!
Not being an electrician and rapidly running out of time I did not have time to track down ‘why?’ – just needed to sort it quickly. The plan was to order a new battery and collect it first thing in the morning before zooming off too (the long awaited wedding) – Janette would be going ahead to start on the church flowers with me (support crew, sweeper upper of leaves and general flower arranging debris picker upper) following on in Hilma.
Battery ordered, now tackle the passenger seat and get the battery out – duly armed with spanners I removed all the bolts I thought and voila – my god it was heavy. I made sure I had disconnected the solar panel fuse, there was also a huge 50 amp fuse next to the battery – so I thought it prudent to remove that as well. Job done, smelly noisy battery removed. Of course having bought it second hand we had no idea how old these batteries were – they looked good but who knows.
Next day, collected new battery and also ordered another one (105 Ah) so that when we returned I could fit another one that would both be of the same age.
Battery fitted, seat replaced (yes, still blooming heavy) – all packed up, ready to roll with a smug smile on my face, off I tootle to the CL site which was 200yds from the church where wonderwoman florist Janette would be making the tiny church (90 seats max) into what would look like a miniature Chelsea Flower Show.
My afternoon spent sweeping, watering, misting and generally doing flowery type things that I didn’t have a clue about getting the church ready for ……….. the wedding.