Death of a Battery

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1. After I saw "lead-acid" I had to read no further.

My do-it-yourself EV conversion was running fine, then one day in 2009 I woke up to the sound of the charger beeping. The car's windows were fogged with acidic vapor, and 10 out of 14 batteries had boiled over. $2,000 worth of deep-cycle batteries were toast.

As I later learned, it's due to a cascade effect from connecting batteries in series that were never designed to be. Resistance across the chain creates sulfate buildup on the plates which quickly spirals out of control. Almost impossible to prevent this from happening.