How are you keeping your batteries healthy this winter? full time multi stage maintainer? Start and warm up monthly? Occasional check and charge? Disconnect and ignore till next spring? Desulfater - snake oil or must have?

I know there has been discussion in the past about fires.

After having a near garage fire due to a Battery Tender shorting out,.....
Upgraded to a Battery Minder works great including the desulfater function..

Just my $0.02...

I just disconnect the negative cable

I know that works for my Barracuda but what about newer vehicles that have computers? Is it ok to disconnect them?

The owner's manual for my 2005 GTO with a computer says to disconnect the negative cable if the car will not be used for a few months. I'm pretty sure that's what is done with cars fresh off the assembly line that are unsold and parked outside in an inventory lot. A good disconnected battery will hold its charge for quite a while, just as the disconnected batteries for sale on retail shelves mostly stay fully charged.

Next spring simply put a charger on your disconnected battery to top it off. The meter on your charger should show (1) the battery doesn't need much charge, that is, the needle isn't far from zero, and (2) the needle should go to zero and stop charging in a short while, say an hour, indicating all is good with the battery.

My wife's 2018 car was manufactured in May 2018, and she bought it in October 2018. So the battery was probably disconnected for nearly 5 months. Not a problem.

I have a battery tender, but don't use it here in Texas. I don't see any need for them, even up north. As said, next spring, simply top off your battery, and you should be good.

I have an odyssey that doesn’t require a float charger unless going over two years so I just pull the cable.

As for unsold new cars, we never once did anything for storage at the factory shipping area. One day a guy called some of us over to see a car that had sat for over a year. We were stunned. He noticed it had paperwork from a printer that had been replaced so he looked at the date.

I have these on the lawn equipment battery, the import cat battery, just pulled a group 27 off the larger one. But truth is all.3 would be fine on the 27. And a 4th one on my whole house generator. It runs weekly to do a maintinace cycle. But i keep.the battery hooked up.24/7 battery seen to last way beyond what they should. Supossed to De-Something them too.

I give up. Can not post a picture here. Because by the time my blocker blocks all the stuff here it times out
. And i can do so every place but here. I even admin and mod a few places. No one has this much crap for a device to fight. Sorry i can't help........no pic.

I disconnect the cables for the winter... quick charge in spring.
I agree about posting pics here. Usually it times out on me too, and pic won't post.

It's 35* in my garage now. I run 2 Schumacher battery tenders on both of my cycles. I always leave them on the concrete floor or a metal stand when charging batteries.

I disconnect them and try to charge them a couple times over winter.
I don't trust any sort of charger on them all the time.

I suspect my POS battery tendered actually killed my RedTop, although there were to 'fingerprints' to positively ID the perpetrator, however it was after the over-the-winter trickle charge from that box that my negative battery post popped-out of the case, by the time I was ready to hit the road for the 1st car show I very much needed a new battery b/c that post literally detached!!!

Sooo....if it was the tenderer that did the battery in, by perhaps overcharging it, it was caused by junk equipment.

Prior to using that trickler charger I would remove the battery from the car and occasionally (once a month) charge it with the regular charge.

This is mid-west winter climate, right across the river from Detroit, MI.

Charge it first and then I leave negative cable off. I take the negative off after ever outing anyhow.

It is probably a good time to peel the label off the top of a “no maintenance” lead acid battery
and see if there are hidden caps that could be opened with a pair of sharp dental picks.

If so, leave those caps in place for now,
get and start a stopwatch to record the time segments you are expending,
disconnect the battery,
remove from the vehicle,
take it outside,
put on a full face shield and
synthetic fabric overall,
have a helper on stand by
have baking soda on hand to neutralize,
then gently pry the caps off,
top off with distilled water slowly using baby medicine syringe.

When cells are topped off with distilled water
reinstall caps temporarily,
hook up a

https://pulsetech.com/products/xc400-xtreme-charge-4amp-battery-maintainer-charger

(or similar)
and charge for 24 hours to 48 hours
checking occasionally to see whether
the yellow 75% LED has blessedly gone off
and the annoyingly slow green 100% LED is finally on.

Now use your Deka 00231 temperature compensated battery hygrometer

https://www.amazon.com/East-Penn-Temperature-Correcting-Hydrometer/dp/B0002KKTYU

to check the specific gravity of each cell
and write down below last year’s numbers.with new time & date.
Note degradations.

Reinstall cell caps,

Now hook up your
Konnwei KW681 Car & Motorcycle Battery Tester with OBD-II Diagnostic Tester ($13 at select thrift store)

www.konnwei.com

and do all the available tests (SAE, EN, IEC, DIN, EU, JIS, CCA, CA, MCA)
for standardized amp capacity and internal battery ohms of impedance.
Write all results down below last years values - note any degradations.
Ponder anew whether those picky Japanese have created a better test than SAE.

Now use a MAC Tools Model B77300
with its lovely old fashioned analog meter
to do a ten second 130 amp load test,
keeping in mind a cell might explode.

Re-install battery in vehicle,
or leave out for boosting your home standby battery back up uninterruptible power supply(s) for home electronics.

Total up time on stop watch, convert to hours,
divide by at least 2000, (or your total paid work hours last 12 months)
then multiple by your last year’s gross income
and see if the result is several times
what a new $@#& battery costs.....

Disconnect negitive and charge once a month

This. Anything more and you're over thinking it. If it fails, it was ready to go anyway.

My B'cuda gets parked in the garage and the battery gets disconnected, cover put on and done. 2018 Mustang GT convert gets parked in the garage, covered and started every month. Zero issues with either. WI winters and unheated attached garage.

360view - Wow, I could have walked out to the shop and disconnected all the batteries in the time it took to read that.

Thanks everyone. In the last few decades I have tried everything from disconnect and forget to an old nothing fancy Schumacher maintainer. I think you guys are right. Not worth worrying about. I'll just disconnect them all. I might even bring in the coach batteries from my motorhome so that I can disconnect the shore power.

Well, that was kinda a joke,
but I really did those steps “babying” a 2013 bought battery out to year 2020.

I bought a new battery in 2020
and after I wrote that post I went out and put the Pulsetech charger on it and within 6 hours the green LED indicating 100% was lit and the power going into the battery from the charger had dropped from 41 watts to 10 watts, which is about 0.7 amps of trickle charge.

In 1976 “Jeffery Battery Powered Ramcars” commonly hauled or “shutltled” coal in the mines the short distance from continuous miner to conveyor belt. A set of batteries cost $30,000 back then and it paid to carefully check them cell by cell to get another year’s use. Individual cells were held in place with tar, and you could pull a bad cell and replace it with a good cell. A remember the Trojan Battery Company had a particularly good field rep who would travel around educating about lead acid batteries.

There is also the still debated issue whether to add a chemical like cadmium sulfate in tiny amounts to a bad cell:

sample quote

A first test cell was built and put on charge. Within minutes its voltage climbed beyond gassing potential and kept climbing. The potential finally settled at 2.95V at 130mA. The cell was left on charge for two days, then discharge tested. The sulfated negative plate delivered less than 10% of its original capacity. The test was repeated twice. The capacity did not rise. A few grams of cadmium sulfate was then introduced into the electrolyte and stirred. About an hour later, the cell began to slowly draw more current, its voltage fell. It was now accepting charge. The cell was cycled three more times. By the last cycle, the capacity of the negative had risen to 20% of its original capacity. Additional cycling over a period of several days did not improve this figure.

A total of three negative plates were tested with cadmium sulfate. The amounts of cadmium sulfate were varied. It was immediately apparent that very little should be used to avoid severe dendrite growth of cadmium on the negatives. All three negative plates provided essentially the same 20% Ah results.
...snip...

We tried aluminum sulfate, magnesium sulfate, sodium sulfate and zinc sulfate. They appeared to do no harm, provided no benefit - charging with or without was equally effective. EDTA damages the battery.

A combination of pulse charging and cadmium sulfate treatment is commonly used by commercial lead-acid battery reconditioning specialists. Their "feedstock" consists of worn out and neglected batteries. It takes a week and is known to provide a 30% recovery rate on reclaimed scrap batteries.

end quote

from

https://batteryvitamin.net/sulfation_remedies_demystified

Didn’t we have a Moparts member “David in St Croix” who had big stationary lead acid batteries he did maintenance on for overnight house power from his solar cells?
I wonder what experience he has had maintaining those batteries....

Some guys will tell ya no floor. But batteries are not made like when it was a no-no anymore
35 wow. That's real Pen-E-Guin weather. My wife won't go outside in them temps. Supossed to get down to 69-68.