Travel lockdown and car battery

[Brookert]

Someone can perhaps explain the math, but as I understand it, the battery draw on startup is pretty high and idle and/or very short trips sometimes don't make up for this. I'm no longer driving any kind of distance so have resorted to extending the journey for shopping and leaving the car running at idle where possible in between journeys.

Battery went flat on my discovery a few weeks ago because I was pratting around with it. Jump started it and left it for just over an hour to run at idle.

Started up first flick on a very cold morning the next day, so the battery must have had a decent charge in that time.

 

[jpaul]

with a 2mile trip a day, I would have thought that would be touch and go for an older battery, cold weather, with potential rear window demist ..
but Guernsey's temperate .

Answering my earlier question - apparently should only hook up a live battery to a trickle charger, otherwise, need to remove it ....
so I'll need to check the CTEK one I was thinking of has a way to force trickle.

 

[Scythe]

with a 2mile trip a day, I would have thought that would be touch and go for an older battery, cold weather, with potential rear window demist ..
but Guernsey's temperate .

Answering my earlier question - apparently should only hook up a live battery to a trickle charger, otherwise, need to remove it ....
so I'll need to check the CTEK one I was thinking of has a way to force trickle.

You can trickle charge the battery when connected to the car or not so long as the car is OFF, it doesn't matter. What you shouldn't do is have the charger connected whilst your car is running due to a risk of overcharging and damaging the battery.


The CTEK will look after itself, if it is fully charged then all stages will be lit and the green battery logo will be lit indicating the battery is fully charged and it's just monitoring it. It will transition between its 'fully charged' stage and the 'maintain' charging stage as the battery naturally discharges to keep exercising the battery. Plug it in and leave it to do its thing, it will only charge if the battery needs a top up.

The CTEK MXS5.0 does have a recondition function to try to revive a deeply discharged battery, but this shouldn't be used in normal use.

See page 5 of the MXS5.0 manual for what I mean about the charging stages.

 

[jpaul]

You can trickle charge the battery when connected to the car or not so long as the car is OFF

OK being clearer about my comment

apparently should only hook up a live battery to a trickle charger, otherwise, need to remove it

... yes of course the car has to be off, in all cases, but,
if you have a charger that may not limit itself to a trickle charge, I wouldn't put that on a live(still in the car/connected) battery ...

my current battery is 5years, old, has lost some capacity, if the ctek thought it would full power charge it, that could nack some electronics in the car, I wouldn't take that gamble.