Suppose you drive your car and make really short trips like typically 5-10 minutes. Is this enough time to keep the battery charged?
If not, has anyone use a solar battery tender so that it can keep the battery charged even while it sits in the sun? How long does it have to sit in the sun or in the shade to have it charged?
Note car is recent model from around 2014. I believe for older cars, there were more issue with charging battery on shorter runtime.
I’ve had more of an issue with newer cars and all the electronics they have. You might have a problem with those short drives. You can find out by checking your battery voltage once a week or so. Or you can just get a battery tender, there’s a solar powered one from Battery Tender for $70 on Amazon (I use the plug-in version).
No
I currently do this. It keeps my battery charged up because I leave it on the car’s dashboard all the time. But I live in Florida so it sees a lot of sun
I would not call a 10 year old car “recent” but older cars had an easier time keeping the battery charged because there were fewer electronics that stay partially “awake” to drain the battery.
I did check a few articles on the solar battery tenders, but apparently they do need full sunlight to work. It probably won’t work well enough for my purpose. Thanks!
A 10-minute drive once each week will not maintain the battery’s charge. 4 drives of ten-minutes each day will maintain the battery’s charge. The latter is 40 minutes of charge time each day. There can be a big difference in “short drives”, yours probably falls somewhere in the middle.
Try a solar charger, 1 or 2 hours of sun each day will help replace most of the energy the vehicle consumes while parked.
What do you mean by full sun? The angle the sunlight hits the solar cells will have some effect on charging efficiency, but there’s no shortage of sunlight as long as the window you have the solar cells facing is mostly pointing south. If you use a windshield screen, just put the solar cells between the screen and the windshield.