The composition of the plate in lead acid battery plays a vital role on battery performance. Therefore, controlling and monitoring of plate composition is utmost important in order to attain required battery performance. While monitoring negative plate, it has to be ensured that they are not exposed to air, which would otherwise result in Pb oxidation; thereby affecting the accuracy of the test data. Nevertheless, published information is scarce on the "pretreatment and preservation of the negative plates". The objective of this study is to develop a suitable procedure to "preserve and pretreat the negative plate" prior to chemical composition analysis. A host of experimental parameters like immersion time in water, effect of drying reagent and air drying time were studied. Two drying solvents; namely, methanol and acetone were studied to evaluate their suitability. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.