Dumb ol' me I have thrown a variety of good, bad and marginal lawn light solar batteries in my tool box. Now how do I test them to determine which is still chargeable?

 

By "solar battery", do you mean the entire circuit including the solar cell and the battery, or just the battery portion of it?

 

If you leave NiCds laying around too long in the discharged state they sometimes develop a chemical short between the electrodes. Sometimes you can break this short by zapping the cell with high current pulses.

 

i would put them on a power supply somehow and see if theyc charge put multiple in a holder and up the voltage to 1.5* number of batteries. posibly ohm meter +=P on batery -=_ on battery it should get a bit of charge then mesure the voltage

 

I wouldn't recommend ever putting an ohm meter directly across any battery, even it is supposedly discharged. At best, the reading will be useless because the ohm meter is designed to provide power to a device being tested and now you have competing voltages. There is also a fair chance you will end up needing a new ohm meter.