Batteries have a shelf life and will eventually die even if they're not used. To check the date on a battery, you need to know what the characters on the battery mean. The first character will be a number from zero through nine. The date on top of a battery corresponds to the year and month of manufacture. The number corresponds to the year and the letter corresponds to the month. So, if you see an 8D on your battery, it means that it was manufactured in April. “””The first number is the month and the letter is the year. For example, if the code is 3L, the battery was made in March of 2013. If the code is 11J, the battery was made in November of. This is a question that we get a lot, so we figured we'd answer it here in our blog. To check the date on your Exide battery, all you need to do is find the small white sticker on the top of the battery. This sticker will have a bunch. The battery date code chart is a tool that allows you to determine the date of manufacture for a given battery. The date code is typically stamped on the battery itself, and can be used to.