The first skill that you need to develop when you get into the business of reconditioning batteries is the ability to analyze a battery and to figure out whether you should try to recondition it or leave it alone.

This is an important skill, because batteries can be very unstable, and if you try to recondition a battery that has been severely damaged, you may set the battery on fire, or even cause an explosion. This depends upon the kind of battery you're reconditioning, of course - some batteries are more dangerous than others.

However, there's no need to worry, because a simple set of rules will tell you whether a battery is safe to recondition or not.
Besides which, over eighty percent of all batteries are perfectly safe to recondition. Of the remaining twenty percent, another ten percent will not give you any trouble. What this article is going to tell you about is how to recognize the eighty or ninety percent of batteries that are safe to recondition, and also, just as importantly, how to recognize the ten percent or so of batteries that must not be reconditioned under any circumstance.

Let's start with when you should go ahead and recondition a battery.
This is very easy to tell, in-so-much-as a battery can be reconditioned so long as it doesn't show any of the danger signs which indicate that it should not be so. In other words, as a general rule, you can recondition all batteries unless they show some positive signs of being dangerous. I'll be outlining to you exactly what these danger signals actually are.

Don't try reconditioning a battery without safety gear
Need I mention that you should not try to recondition a battery if you don't happen to own the correct equipment, and especially if you don't happen to own the necessary safety gear? If you don't own the right equipment, and you don't own the right safety gear, then I would advise you to not try to recondition the battery.

At the very minimum, you need a good quality charger, optimized for the particular kind of battery that you are trying to recondition, as well as rubber gloves that reach beyond the elbow, if possible, as well as a rubber mask for the face with large glass goggles that will not be vulnerable to the corrosive acids in a lead-acid battery, for example. Now, that was pretty self-obvious.

Similarly, you must not try to recondition any battery that is clearly severely damaged, or for that matter, a battery that is even slightly visibly damaged.
There are complex layers within a battery that sustain the chemical reactions, and if these layers have been breached it can cause short-circuits or even an intense chemical reaction leading to a fire. If you can see such visible damage, all you can do is get rid of the battery in a way that is safe for the environment.

The third point at which you should abandon reconditioning a battery is, if you've actually applied the reconditioning process once or twice and it absolutely has not worked.
It means that something has gone integrally wrong with the battery, and further attempts to recondition the battery can only prove to be dangerous. Once again, you need to properly recycle the battery.

But, other than these, at all other times, reconditioning a battery is not only safe, but it is advised and will certainly save you money.