Setting up battery maintainer with Google Home

[m in sc]

WD40 is a cleaner and a water displacement chemical. its about as much as a lubricant as spit is.

Optimate is very good, for sure. remember, a maintainer is to prevent discharge, nop designed top up a battery. (that's what chargers are for) . Its like wd in a way. can you 'top up' a battery with a maintainer? yes. but its not what its for. same as 'lubricating' a chain with wd.

 

[SneakyDingo]

can you 'top up' a battery with a maintainer? yes.

<selective reading intensifies>

 

[m in sc]

nothing selective about it. the old school maintainers were NOT meant to charge, read the directions. They will explicitly tell you its a maintainer, not a charger. (so it won't discharge) These are the small cube ones with the 2 prong sae plug. I have 2, they don't get used TBH. The new ones on battery tenders site lists them as charger/maintainers. Probably due to people trying to use the old maintainers as chargers. they as a matter of fact, don't sell those anymore. So now they are all charger/maintainers of a different design. (at least as far as Deltran, who makes battery tenders, is concerned)

 

[ssaigol]

Now you see? That's what real engineers do. Take a simple thing and turn it into something complicated.... Now here is the simple non-engineer version:

A battery is like a container. It has one opening at the top from which it can be filled or emptied or refilled. It is not, and I repeat not a water tank which has a filler opening at the top and a supply opening at the bottom. What that means is that a battery cannot be charged and discharged at the same time. A higher voltage on its terminals will charge it. A lower voltage will discharge it.

Batteries are not and we're never supposed to be kept in a state of constant charge. Their chemistry and mechanical construction is such that keeping a battery at a constant level of voltage will degrade it's performance. It is reasonable to assume that lead acid batteries last longest when they are occasionally discharged and then brought up to full charge as it happens in our cars.

So battery maintainers are also designed to cycle the batteries using a charge-discharge algorithm. It is the difference in the various manufacturers algorithms that give us different results.

The difference in battery chargers vs maintainers is that battery maintainers typically don't have a high current transformer to provide long charging times needed to bring up a dead battery. But nowadays all maintainers do charging, just takes longer (up to 20 hrs on car batteries. Longer on truck batteries).

 

[m in sc]

I just ride (or at least run) my bikes in the winter. that's about the simplest thing to do. I also get 5-8 years out of batteries.. no, not kidding.

 

[TrailSnot]

Sounds cheaper to plug and unplug the Tender, I'll do that.

Depending on the severity of winter in a given year I may pull the batteries and put them in the house, attaching a Tender for a couple of days now and then. Other years I'll leave them in the bikes and they'll all get a turn on Tenders.
I don't tend to leave Tenders permanently attached, my personal preference.
I would expect that inside the house vs outside in frigid temps would be more beneficial for battery life, but I can't say that I've noticed an improvement in battery longevity either way, so long as they get power thrown at them on occasion.

 

[AZ7000']

I just ride (or at least run) my bikes in the winter. that's about the simplest thing to do. I also get 5-8 years out of batteries.. no, not kidding.

Agreed, and it gets cold here.... Snow too