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Hot take: leaving a battery tender on all winter cooked my buddy's 68 Camaro wiring
My neighbor parked his 68 Camaro in a metal shed last November with a cheap trickle charger hooked up and never looked at it again until March. He pulled the cover off and the charger had cooked itself, melted the casing, and the positive clamp had welded itself to the terminal. The battery was bone dry and swollen, and he swears the shed smelled like burnt plastic from ten feet away. Insurance would not touch it because he had no fire alarm or temp sensor in there. I get wanting the battery ready for spring, but those cheap units run hot and nobody checks them. Anyone here run a smart tender with a temp cutoff, and what brand actually holds up past two seasons?
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wesleyb206d ago
Kinda have to disagree with blaming the tender here. A 68 Camaro has zero computers and basically no parasitic draw, so the battery will sit for months and hold a charge fine on its own, you only actually need a tender if there is something draining it or you want it topped off once a month or so. Leaving a cheap charger plugged in for four straight months, unattended, in a metal shed with no airflow, that is not a battery tender problem, that is a guy who never once walked out there to check on it. Even a good smart unit with temp cutoff will fail if it is a junk brand, so the real fix is a decent maintainer plus actually looking at it every few weeks. And honestly the fire alarm point is the thing everyone skips, a 20 dollar smoke detector would have saved him the whole mess.
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