Am plumbing the Car Talk community’s wisdom to ask:
If almost all my driving is less than two miles (wife and I are 76 and live near a shopping mecca), should I connect a charger to the battery every three months or so?
Yesterday I had to replace a good quality 4-year-old Bosch battery that I’m sure would have gone for a couple years more if not for all the short trips to the market, library, pickleball courts, etc.
In its last days, you could hear the battery struggle to turn the starter. The home charger fixed that, but testers at two chain-store battery sellers both said “Replace battery.”
Which I did. But if I don’t change my driving habits, which I won’t, the new battery won’t last long. It’s only got a 1-year warranty (but for $70, that’s fine), unlike the old one (twice that), with 3 years.
I’m pretty sure regular charging at home would help, but have a few questions:
Should I remove the wires from the battery terminals before connecting the charger? It’s easy and lets me clean off the terminals, but also means I have to re-program all the radio presets. (A first world tragedy.)
When I remove the wires from the battery, is there a way for the radio to maintain the presets, as they did after the new battery was installed by the shop?
If you lived in San Antonio TX, where the winters are mild, how often would you apply the charger to the battery? I’m thinking every three months?
4 years is good for San Antonio. As for charging, I would periodically hook up a battery tender to the wife’s seldom-driven car to top off the charge. I don’t know that it added to the battery’s life, though.
If this is really an issue, every three months isn’t enough. It should be every few days. Standard car batteries don’t like deep discharges, so you want to keep it pretty full.
If you’re doing this that often, you want a battery tender with a two-part cable where one part of the cable permanently attaches to the battery and the other part snaps into that easily.
On another note, make sure you’re following the severe service schedule for your maintenance, especially for your oil changes.
On both my vehicles I use solar chargers. On my passenger car I put one on the dash when parked. The other vehicle is a truck, I have one permanently mounted on the truck bed tool box.
The car soar panel is plugged into a permanently hot cigarette lighter outlet.
The permanently mounted truck solar panel is wired directly to the battery.
Whether they prolong the life of the batteries I can’t definitely say but they do keep them fully charged.
The fewer times you charge/discharge a battery, the longer it will remain “good”. So I doubt your driving style is the fundamental problem. However a “good” battery can still be discharged enough that it won’t crank the engine robustly. This could happen if you don’t drive long enough distances to fully charge the battery. So maybe that’s the problem. I’m a geezer and don’t drive my vehicles often enough to keep the battery fully charged sometimes. My solution is to connect a battery charger probably once every 6 weeks, and let it charge the batteries at the 2 amp rate for 5 or 6 hours, or sometimes I let it run overnight. I have older vehicles which don’t seem to mind that I connect the battery charger to the battery + & -, without disconnecting anything on the car first. But this method might cause problems in newer vehicles, don’t know. I always connect the charger to the battery first, before plugging the charger in. Make sure to follow all of the instructions that come w/your battery charger.
Concur w/advice above, 4 year battery life in San Antonio seems about what I’d expect.
Thanks, Tester. He doesn’t like trickle chargers; I need to research that. Looks like the memory voltage is provided through the OCD port. Something else to research.
Trickle chargers continue to charge the battery even after it’s fully charged, which will damage a battery. That’s why they’re called dumb battery chargers.
A battery maintainer or smart charger charges the battery until it’s fully charged and then floats the charge. Or, only charges the battery when required.
And with a smart battery charger, the battery cables don’t need to be removed.
George, I guess I’m a geezer, too, and somehow am driving only about 3000 miles a year (in a 2011 Toyota Venza).
Replies here show you’re not the only one periodically charging the battery as preventive maintenance. I’ve had an old battery charger in the garage all this time, and it never occurred to me. (?) It’s occurred now, though, and is something I’ll start doing.
Thanks for your input.
Short trips are not bad for a battery. How many miles or hours do drive the car per year? 1000 to 1500 hours of driving and charging is a common life for a battery in a hot climate due to over charging. Charging the battery more will only make this problem worse.
I don’t know why you say this. If a car is repeatedly started and not driven enough to replace the charge used to start the car (plus the normal drain between uses), then the charge level will steadily go down.
I don’t understand why every one seems to saying about heat killing batterys I live in south and average 8 to 10 years of battery life but I also don’t cheap out when buying batterys.
It depends on you driving environment, if you spent two hours each day in city traffic, your battery wouldn’t last 2 years. Under hood temperatures are over 180 F, your truck doesn’t experience as much heat while driving down a country road.
Say starting takes 300 Amps for 2 seconds. 10 Amps of charging for 60 seconds will replace most of the charge lost due to starting. Trips less than one minute would be very rare! 10 Amps of charging is also very low. It could easily be 30 Amps of charging.
