Thread: 2.4 PUMA FLATTENS BATTERY WHEN NOT USED FOR A WEEK

Originally Posted by scarry

Sounds like you need to charge the batteries regularly with a good charger.
I have to do this with ours as sometimes it will sit around for a good few weeks.
With two batteries you need a much longer drive to keep them both charged properly,350Km once a month won't do it.
I find doing one run of 700Km a month,then shorter runs in between, won't keep ours at 100% charged.

Both our batteries,start and aux are almost 5yrs old,and still fine.

I have just bought the whiz bang C-Tek charger and will leave it on when not in use. This senses when fully charged and then just does a trickle top up as and when required.

Originally Posted by Chenz

I am using this C-Tek charger to keep me out of trouble but it still doesn't explain how it goes from fully charged to flat in a matter of days.

If a battery is sulphated, then you may have a 100Ah battery that is actually only 30Ah ( or less ) of useable battery capacity.

A battery will loose capacity while it is not in use, regardless of whether it has full capacity available or has a limited capacity because of sulphation.

With a full battery, a small discharge will take a long time to effect the battery's level of charge, but that same small discharge will rapidly drop the level of charge in a battery that is badly discharged.

Those two links I posted will show you how to carryout a simple but effective load test and then after doing the battery maintenance cycles, you use the same load test to see if you have improved the CONDITION of the batteries.

Worth checking for residual current with an inline ammeter, take the neg terminal off the battery and insert the ammeter between the battery neg post and the neg cable with everything switched off. Somewhere there will be specs available for what the maximum residual current should be. If you then find that you have a parasitic drain somewhere, tracking it down (or at least isolating it to a particular circuit) is pretty much a matter of pulling fuses one by one whilst doing the ammeter test.