This time of year, the natural inclination is to wonder what to do about all our batteries that aren’t being used, now that the cold has set in. For many people, the first thought is that they need a trickle charger to keep their batteries from excessive discharge until spring arrives. We’d like to suggest a better way.
First, let’s be clear. Anything you do to charge and maintain your batteries during the off season is almost always going to be better than doing nothing. As we have noted many times in these pages, letting a battery sit for an extended period without charging it is a guaranteed way to accelerate sulfation build-up within your battery, which will reduce its useful life. So, if the choice is between a trickle charger or nothing, we’d say trickle away. But, in fairness, trickling means going to a lot of work for a fraction of the benefit.
In the old days (20-30 years ago), most battery chargers and maintainers were relatively simple devices with less than sophisticated components. They worked but did so in a rather crude, blunt force way. This was fine for flooded lead acid batteries, which didn’t have a lot of sophistication themselves. The good news for battery owners of today is that most battery charging products are driven by an MCU that provides much more charge control than old fashioned chargers. Frankly, they need to have this control, as AGM, Spiral Wound, Gel Cell and LiFePO4 (LFP) lithium batteries have become more prevalent in the intervening years. These batteries require a precisely controlled delivery of charging power, making MCU control a necessity.
As with charging, where we abandoned the old “volts goes up / amps go down” method with MCU adoption, there is now a much better way to manage batteries under extended charging than the old trickle method. With trickle charging, once the battery has reached full charge, the charger shifts to a maintenance mode where a constant voltage output (usually around 13.1V) is supplied continuously to keep the battery at full charge. We liken this to slivering a few additional electrons onto the battery to keep it from discharging. Frankly, though, we see this as a prehistoric approach. Again, better than nothing, but less than ideal.
With PRO-LOGIX, we most definitely don’t trickle. Instead, we deliver an enhanced maintenance mode to optimize long-term maintenance scenarios in a way that improves battery health and restores battery reserve capacity. As we noted in a previous Deep Dive into our enhanced maintenance mode process, “Upon charge complete, we actually rest the battery for a set period. A known good battery will not self-discharge over the period of a few days. Once the rest period has ended, we then exercise the battery by placing a load on it (simulating the starting event) and follow that up with a new, full charge cycle. This process will repeat for as long as the charger remains connected to the battery.”
In the lab and in the field, we have found that deploying our enhanced maintenance mode extends battery life by more fully activating the battery’s chemistry and more deeply charging the battery. In essence, the PRO-LOGIX maintenance process provides a significant return on the time and effort that you invest in your offseason battery care routine. The enhanced maintenance mode is built into every PRO-LOGIX portable charger and maintainer, from our PL2112 and PL2140 to our PL2320 and PL2410. Try it once and, we believe, you’ll never want to service your batteries any other way.
