Are batteries marked with their date of manufacture?

[Brambles]

Interesting. In that case I suspect it is a date code and plant code for the manufacture of the lid moulding.

There will be a date code (or serial number possibly) for the battery somewhere on it. .

 

[Brambles]

I am now being told there should be a long number stamped on the lid back right with terminals towards you.

The 1st two characters are the date code and straight forward. 1st number is year. e.g. 5 is 2015. The second is a letter for the month A B C ..Jan Feb March etc. The rest is the battery type/model.

 

 

[Derek Uzzell]

That makes better sense...

 

Regarding Banner batteries, on Page Two of this earlier thread the ‘date-code’ of their “Energy Bull” batteries was discussed.

 

http://forums.outandaboutlive.co.uk/forums/Motorhomes/Motorhome-Matters/Banner-Batteries-Knackered-After-6-Months/40167/31/

 

I was never comfortable with what Nigel (Veletron) was told by Banner(UK) about the “BCBFE” marking on his batteries, so I have emailed Banner as follows:

 

 

 

"My motorcaravan has a Banner “Energy Bull” 957 51 100Ah battery.

 

I plan to fit to a second 957 51 (parallel-connected to the present one), but before I do this I wish to confirm the age of the present battery.

 

As the Banner website’s FAQ section advises, my battery does not show any immediately self-explanatory date-marking on it, but its casing’s upper surface does have two 5-character groups stamped into it and I hope that one of these groups includes a ‘date-code’.

 

The two 5-character groups are “FBBEF” (next to the battery’s negative terminal) and “xx51A” (next to the battery’s positive terminal).

 

I’m guessing that “xx51A” is the date-code and that (reading backwards) letter A to L defines the month, numbers 00 to 99 define the year and xx is just a ‘filler’. My battery’s date of assembly would then be January 2015 – which would be plausible as my motorcaravan was built in the early months of 2015. But that’s just reverse-logic guesswork...

 

If my assumption about the “xx51A” group is wrong and the battery-date is hidden in the “FBBEF” group, could you tell me how to decipher the code, please?

 

And if neither of the two 5-character groups stamped on my Banner battery provides ‘dating’ information, could you please explain the purpose of each group anyway and what the characters in each group represent?

 

Also, if neither of the stamped groups is date-related, is there something else on my battery that shows its date of manufacture?

 

(My previous motorcaravan, bought new by me in July 2005 was supplied with a (non-Banner) battery clearly marked with a mid-2003 date-code stamped into one of its terminals, which is just one reason why I’m keen to establish battery-age nowadays!)”

 

 

 

The mid-2003 battery referred to in the last paragraph was the Motorcraft starter-battery factory-fitted to my Ford Transit-based Hobby. I sold the Hobby in 2014 and had replaced its original starter-battery purely as a precautionary measure not too long before that, delegating the Motorcraft battery to other duties.

 

I never bothered to investigate the age of the Motorcraft battery as it always performed adequately and it’s only recently that I noticed the “28 03” stamped into its terminal-post. Even though the Motorcraft battery is (apparently) now over 12 years old, it still seems to be in good working order.

 

Hopefully Banner’s reply to my email will be educational, but it wouldn’t surprise me much to be told that the age of an Energy Bull battery cannot be established without using the bar-code on the battery and having access to Banner’s computer system.

[Derek Uzzell]

I have now had a reply from Banner.

 

My Banner “Energy Bull” carries two 5-character groups - “FBBEF” (next to the battery’s negative terminal) and “XX51A” (next to the battery’s positive terminal).

 

Banner’s advice about the date-code marking on my battery is as follows:

 

The date-code is contained within the “FBBEF” group.

 

The week/year date of manufacture is identified by the initial 4 letters of the group, with A=0, B=1, C=2 etc. The 1st pair of letters identifies the week and the 2nd pair of letters identifies the year.

 

(So FBBE equates to 5114 and indicates that my battery was made in the 51st week of 2014.)

 

The 5th letter in the group provides Banner with information identifying the person in charge of the production line.

 

Banner told me that the “XX51A” 5-character group on my battery identifies the production line and battery make-up.

 

Nigel’s (Veletron’s) decoding of the “BCBFE” group on his Banner batteries was correct, though the coding system is not hexadecimal-based (0-9, A-F), just a simpler letter/number substitution system where A=0 and so on.