Thread: battery maintenance

You could get yourself a ctek charger which you can leave on indefinitely, or you can go solar. According to Tim(Drivesafe) at Traxide, it is ok to run a solar panel, up to 10 watts, without the need of a regulator.

I have a few ctek's. One permanently on my motorbike when it is parked and the other on my caravan house battery.

Tim does prefer the solar option as he reckons that at night the battery gets a rest, which he believes is good for the battery.

I recently purchased a 5 watt solar panel for $12 to put on my sons P38 while he is overseas.

Hi

I only use my Disco at weekends so I've got a projecta maintenance charger that I just plug into a connector that I already installed on the battery, it's self regulating so switches its self on and off as needed.

Jon

This is exactly what the ctek does and it comes with a plug that you can leave permanently attached to the battery, as well as the normal alligator clips.

Originally Posted by d2dave

This is exactly what the ctek does and it comes with a plug that you can leave permanently attached to the battery, as well as the normal alligator clips.

Souns like what I'm looking for.
I've got a C tek charger. I've heard some will charge through the tow bar plug. What about charging through the standard 12V socket in the dash?
If I charge the battery directly (as you describe), is it Ok to leave the battery in situ, & do you have the number of the ctek lead that I would need?
Pickles.

Hi Pickles

The Projecta charger I have came with the cables and clips,
You could quite easily make some up, go to somewhere like Jaycar and they should have the correct conectors and cable,
the charger I have has a long twin cable coming from the charger with a twin female socket on the end, this plugs into a twin male socket with a short twin cable with battery connectors on the end, this has one wire to the positive and one to the negative permenently connected to the battery, so you just pop the bonnet, plug it in, switch on and leave until next weekend
It also came with a twim male socket with short wires and crocodile clips on each cable, so it would plug into the long charger twin cable and you could use it to charge other batteries,
I personally would only try charge the battery directly, the contacts would not be as good with the outlets, But I do know people that have fitted anderson plug outlets on trucks with inaccessable batteries for charging and jump starting

Jon

Originally Posted by Pickles2

Souns like what I'm looking for.
I've got a C tek charger. I've heard some will charge through the tow bar plug. What about charging through the standard 12V socket in the dash?
If I charge the battery directly (as you describe), is it Ok to leave the battery in situ, & do you have the number of the ctek lead that I would need?
Pickles.

Something like this.

NEW Ctek MXS5 0T 12 Volt 5 AMP 5A Battery Charger Deep Cycle AGM Calcium MXS5 0 | eBay

They come with a set of leads that you permanently connect to the battery.

You then just lift the bonnet, or seat in a defender and plug it in. With these chargers there is no need to remove a battery lead.

They also come with alligator clips as well.

Although I have never done this, I can't see why you could not charge through a trailer plug or power socket, as long as it has a direct feed back to the battery.

I would be interested to hear others thought's on this.

Dropped my good 20A charger on the garage floor and she no work no more ....

Kamper has a 10A Projecta, so using a 10m 6B&S ext' lead with anderson plugs I connect the kampers anderson lead to the anderson on the back end of the D2 and use the 10A Projecta to charge the kamper and D2 batteries ... works fine.

If the traxide USI-160 has disconnected the D2 aux' battery from the main battery, once there's enough charge in the D2 aux battery, manually connecting the two D2 batteries by operating the traxide dash switch for the USI-160 3 or 4 times get enough charge across to the starting battery and the USI-160 then stays in shared mode and the main battery charges.

If you have an aux' power feed through your trailer lights plug, it will work by making up a trailer plug to battery charger adapter cable.

Thanks Jon and Dave. Do you have the models numbers of the peojecta and the ctec charges that you have?
Tom