Video: How to Extend the Life of Your Car Battery

If you happen to live near a Lidl grocery store, they have a battery charger one sale this week for $15 that has the same processor and is the same internally as a CTEK charger. It does the business on AGMS. 

I admit, Frank's words from this video went through my head last night, so I walked out to the garage and put the 911 back on the charger. I'd rather not buy another battery. 

In reply to David S. Wallens :

Buy a battery?!??!

What he says about AGMs is true. 60-70% of "dead" ones can be brought back by a proper charger or a gentle roughing off to help with descaling. Basically go to any parts stores with your dead battery and ask if they have an AGM core in the group size that you need, a core is a core to them. 

I am an accomplished killer of batteries.  No battery in the MPV has ever lasted more than 3 years.  I would put a battery in the RX-7 about that often.  My motorcycle needed a fresh battery every Spring.

AGM's are harder to kill.  Both the RX-7 and the bike have AGM's now, and they take the abuse much better.

Dropped $200 a couple weeks ago for a deep cycle Deka battery for the boat.  I'm going to try to take better care of that one.  I had a trickle charger, but I think I loaned it out.  Don't remember to whom, though....

Lidl, you say?  15 bucks?  I need to pick one of those up.

Nice vid. I'm glad he glossed right over the pulse charging topic because that one glosses me over pretty quick, lol. I own enough cars that batteries and keeping them all healthy is a notable annoyance and the solution i've come to is solar chargers. You can get a 5w solar panel with alligator clips for ~$13-15 dollars on Amazon. At this point i think i own 7 or 8 of them. I'm also using the $49 Walmart batteries whenever possible. I put advance auto AGMs in my parents' vehicles and my MS6 (that doesn't get enough sunlight to use a solar charger anyway) because i've been really impressed with them, but for most of my stuff, it's the cheap ones! I'm not really impressed with them but realistically a fully charged $49 battery functions better than a $100+ battery that only gets driven twice a month. This is not the solution for everyone but $49 battery and $15 solar charger is the most cost effective solution for my 'fleet'. Right now i have 11 functional car batteries that i can think of. That's not a record of most batteries in cars I've owned but it's a record number of them i've actually kept functional!! And i still have less money in solar chargers than i would have in one good quality jump box.

My battery has been marginal for a while now. I recently got a Noco Genius 1 charger that I like pretty well (it just has the lights, like he talks about in the video). But it has 6V/12V/lead acid/AGM modes, and it's only 1 amp so it goes slow. The first time I put it on it took 3 days to charge and "optimize", whatever that means (I assume cleaning the plates?). I'm going to clean the terminals and add water today, and then put the charger back on it.

In reply to slowride :

Slow is actually better for bringing back the completely dead. I have a .8a that I'll hook up to a deader than dead battery for 48 hours before putting a smart charger on it. Then it'll read 25-50% but will take a charge as voltage will be where it needs to be, prior to the .8a, voltage wouldn't even have been high enough for a smart charger to give it much of a go. 

In reply to captdownshift (Forum Supporter) :

Yeah, this is what I figured, although the biggest driver for me was price and availability. I didn't want to buy a charger that would cost more than a battery. This Noco also has a "force" mode, where you can make it start charging even if the battery reads as too dead to charge. I didn't have to use it though.