Thread: Question on Battery longevity when not regularly driving the vehicle

Originally Posted by camel_landy

Have a look at something like an Optimate charger... It's very popular with bikers & kit car owners. It monitors, conditions & trickle charges and is specifically designed for vehicles that are left standing for long periods of time.

HTH

M

yep, thats what I use on the bike and ride on mower, they even come with the wiring to connect directly to your terminals so all you have to do is just plug the charger in, too easy.

Sounds interesting guys.

On a similar thought, if you ran a plug out the front from the cranking battery and used it for connecting either a solar panel or optimate charger for charging the battery whilst the vehicle wasn't in use... do you think you could (if you used big enough wires etc.) use it for emergency jumpstarting another vehicle?

Just thinking out loud here... the less I have to access my battery box the better

Originally Posted by Grizzly_Adams

Sounds interesting guys.

On a similar thought, if you ran a plug out the front from the cranking battery and used it for connecting either a solar panel or optimate charger for charging the battery whilst the vehicle wasn't in use... do you think you could (if you used big enough wires etc.) use it for emergency jumpstarting another vehicle?

Just thinking out loud here... the less I have to access my battery box the better

You could if the cabling and connector was up to it. I'm going to do this for easy charging, and will test whether I can jumpstart of it without melting the cable.

You can use 50 amp anderson plugs and go for the largest cable you want to buy and if it’s thicker than 16mm2, you will have to trim a few strands off the thicker cable to get it to fit the 50 amp Anderson terminals.

Personally, I think you will find 16mm2 will work fine.

50 amp Anderson Plugs can handle up to 180 amps for 5 seconds so they will also be good enough for using to jump start.

Cheers.

Originally Posted by jik22

You could if the cabling and connector was up to it. I'm going to do this for easy charging, and will test whether I can jumpstart of it without melting the cable.

I'll bet the cable would fry.

You don't need a huge cable to run a trickle charger, but you would need a very, very heavy cable to jump start another vehicle.

This is the joy of everyone who owns multiple vehciles and dont drive them regularly, I personally dont like contiually charging batts to keep topped up, I rotate them through my daily driver to keep them all active and healthy,

One word... CTEK

http://www.ctek.com/EN/home.asp

Originally Posted by barryj

I'll bet the cable would fry.

You don't need a huge cable to run a trickle charger, but you would need a very, very heavy cable to jump start another vehicle.

i have a pair of 150a anderson plugs that i run 35mm2 cable from a direct connection from my second battery that i use as jumper leads and haven't had a problem with jump starting or cables melting