Now that the weather is warming up just the act of driving your car periodically should be sufficient to keep the battery adequately charged.
As long as you drive it more than a few minutes. A series of short trips where you switch off the engine between trips is bad for the battery, even in warm weather.
I don’t know if I’ve lost track of the date or not, but my Expedition, as written about, wouldn’t start. I had to drag out the battery charger.
Actually, I know for a fact that I’ve lost track of the date, but my previous post bragging of my effectiveness was on 6-Apr, and my failure was only yesterday on 13-Apr.
I need to find my ammeter; I’m sure this is a phantom drain, now. Battery is new. I should be able to go a month without needing to charge the battery.
Very short trips don’t adequately recharge the battery, and they’re also bad for the engine.
Idling your car in the driveway also isn’t very good, because it takes a very long time for the engine to warm up. Your engine spends more time in cold-start enrichment mode, with liquid gasoline getting into the cylinders and sluicing down the oil on the bore walls, compromising lubrication. Cold temps mean an imperfect seal between the bore and the piston rings, allowing extra blow-by of combustion products into the crankcase. Burning gasoline makes CO2 and water, and most of the water in that blow-by gas condenses into the oil, making an oil-water emulsion that doesn’t lubricate as well as pure oil. The oil has additives to deal with this, but it can only take so much; this is why your owner’s manual tells you to change your oil more often if your driving habits include a lot of short trips and/or cold-weather driving.
Want to be kind to your engine? Start your car and drive it away. The power demand due to driving will make the engine warm up much faster than just idling it in the driveway. But don’t just drive it until the temp gauge reaches normal, and then stop driving. You need to drive for more time after it reaches normal operating temp to cook off all that moisture from the oil.
If your battery is healthy, and your car isn’t an old piece of shit with a mysterious current drain somewhere, then it can go for several weeks without driving. We routinely leave a car parked at the airport for three-week vacations, and it starts just fine when we return, even if the temp is in the 30s. If you can’t take your car out for a good healthy drive every few weeks, then connect it to something like a Battery Tender. This is what I use to take care of my motorcycle during the long winter months. If I were going to park my car for a long time, I’d hook it up to one of these.
I once left my car in storage for over 5 months straight. When I got back, it started right up.
Usually. Depends if the alternator is in good shape. It “should” charge at idle rpm.
A mechanic told me his rule of thumb is 30 minutes of idling to make sure a battery is topped off.
What year was the car?
That used to work just fine with older cars, which didn’t have to spend power keeping the computer running (because they didn’t have one) and a batch of assorted tiny lights that never go off (because they didn’t have any of those either.) It generally works pretty well with my 1950’s tractors. But when I first got a vehicle made in the late 90’s I was told to run it about every three weeks if I wasn’t driving it, as otherwise the tiny bit of energy the computer was drawing even when it was turned off would eventually drain the battery.
I don’t know what the cutoff year was; I expect it varied with make and model.
So my stepdaughter’s car has a very new (January) AAA battery, and refused to start yesterday. Battery was dead flat - no dashboard startup when I put the key in, no dome lights, clock had reset, nothing. It lives in an unheated garage, but it never gets below freezing in there. It was last driven 8 days beforehand, for at least 20-30 minutes.
I jump started it, and it started right up. Drove it for half an hour, mostly highway to keep the RPMs up. When I got home I turned it off, waited 10 minutes and it started right up again. Haven’t tried to start it today yet.
So maybe someone left a dome light on or something, but none of them stayed on when I was driving it yesterday. We’ll make sure to drive it once a week, but if it isn’t perfectly reliable in the future, I’ll have AAA come out again to replace it.
Not really applicable for this short term crisis, but if you have a vehicle that isn’t driven often you can switch the battery to a more deep-cycle battery. Most car batteries are for start up and rely on the alternator to keep them charged with regular use. Deep cycle batteries have thicker plates, can be drained much more, and still recover from dead. Start up batteries tend to get ruined when repeatedly drained.
Deep cycle batteries are more expensive but have applications in vehicles that have more power drain, like dash cameras, after market stereos and such.
best way to keep car charged during lockdown is to use deep cycle batteries. it does not discharge over a long period of time. i have found here a article which will help you to choose proper deep cycle battery