Nasty blue battery corrosion. Why so bad? What is it?

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These T105s were neglected and completely dead. They had a 32 panel Quad lam array with an old APT mercury switch charge controller keeping their voltage high while the sun was shining. The battery enclosure was not vented and there were rodent nests in the walls. There was a very strong urine stench. Yuck! The T105s had bare copper bus bars which were partly eaten away and covered in this thick, grainy, blue corrosion. In some places under the busbars it seemed to have congealed into a brown clay-like lump. I've seen small amounts of blue stuff that looks like this plenty of times but never so uniformly thick. I got a few grains of it in the gauntlet of my rubber gloves and felt it burning almost immediately. It stripped the chrome off of my wrenches and it took two lbs of baking soda to neutralize what was on my tools and what left on the Tyvek covered floor of the enclosure. It did not seem to have leached though the Tyvek.

I cleaned up the T105s and the copper bus bars and recycled them. I scraped everything else into a sealed 5 gallon bucket and will take it to the Hazardous Waste pick-up next time it's in town.

What is this stuff? This seems far worse than any batteries I've dealt with before. Much "hotter". I'm wondering if the amonia from the rodent urine was reacting to make it so bad.

-Alex



The T105s have now been replace with ( 8 ) L16RE-Bs, a used 48v inverter and an FM-60. (Old owner passed on. New owners asked for a "minor" fix until they figgure out what their long term needs are.)