- First Name
- Jim
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2019
- Threads
- 12
- Messages
- 3,465
- Reaction score
- 16,521
- Location
- Too damn close to Death Valley
- Vehicle(s)
- '19 JLU
- Banned
- #121
Unfortunately modern vehicles always have parasitic loss, unless you use a physical disconnect something is always drawing on your battery system. That's where we start losing money and battery life on day one. The constant drain and recharge cycle on our batteries starts wearing them immediately. As I posted above I don't use a trickle charger as the amps they put out are insufficient to properly charge these batteries, alot of them also don't put out 13.5-13.8V. You can use one to compensate for parasitic loss but as Odyssey states the battery must be fully charged before hooking up one of these chargers. To do it 100% right we should be topping off our batteries every day and then hooking up a trickle charger when we are not driving the vehicle, I don't know about you but that is too much work for me. I have worked in aviation electronics on military aircraft for over thirty years and all of the aircraft I have worked on have batteries, some as emergency backups that hardly ever get used and some that get used to power things every flight along with some batteries robust enough to crank over a jet engine. I have maintained numerous types of batteries and charging systems (Wet, dry, AGM, lithium Ion) and the one thing that matters the most across all those battery categories for livelihood is a periodic "recondition" cycle. The time between these recondition cycles varies depending on the type of battery and normal usage but on all of them the difference in amp hour capacity after the cycle has completed is always higher. When a batt fails to recondition to a higher amp hour rating it is considered worn out and is condemned. I use the Odyssey OBC-20A charger at home once a week or after anytime I go offroading and have a lot of electrical accessory usage. The Odyssey chargers have a "condition" cycle where the batts are held at 14.7 volts for several hours. In my experience this is the single most important thing you can do to help extend the life of your batteries, other than topping them off every day and keeping them on a trickle charger every time you are not driving the vehicle, which I have already determined is too much effort for me. In the long run we are just fighting time, as all batteries will degrade. After doing a lot of research and using knowledge that I posses from experience I figured out the best system for me (or at least what I am willing to do) and my usage of a dual battery setup. If in the future I see that other people are getting significantly more battery life than me I may rethink my plan.I'm glad you weighed in on this thread as the discussion has quicly become even more interesting and informative (to me anyway). I'm happy to see Jerry post as he's been a great source of information including all the ESS battery threads.
You bring up an interesting point regarding charging the Odyssey batteries using a trickle charger. I haven't used AGM batteries before so I'd like to understand this as well. I looked at Odyssey's information on the subject and it does discuss using a charger but I don't know if/when it will be necessary to do that. I read through their info
https://www.odysseybattery.com/documents/US-ODY-TM-002_1214.pdf and there appears to be a number of issues related to this subject including: parasitic loss, how long the battery is sitting without receiving a charge and the amount of charge the battery gets when the vehicle is running.
Per the above link, "Regardless of the application, it is important to make sure your battery does not have a parasitic load; if there is a slow drain, connect the battery to a foat (sic) (trickle) charger that puts out between 13.5V and 13.8V at the battery terminals."
I'd like to learn more about this and if the charger is needed to help maximize the battery's life.
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