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05/27/2008
Zero Cost Trickle Charger
Tag: Cord With Plug As simple or as complex as you like - a trickle charger that'll save you having a flat battery in rarely-driven cars. Lots of car enthusiasts have more than one car. The kept-mostly-in-the-garage car might be a full-on show car, it might be a classic of yesteryear, or it might simply be a car that you drive rarely. In this household – three cars and two people – the rarely driven car is my turbo Maxima V6. In the lucky event that I have a sequence of new cars to test, poor old Max might be driven only a few times in a month - and then mostly on short trips to the post office. The outcome is that more often than not, it’s got a flat battery. And that’s with a near-new battery in the battery box in the boot! I’ve already got a battery charger but it’s not really the kind of thing I want to leave connected semi-permanently. For one it’s a mains-powered charger with short battery leads – and often the Maxima is parked outside. And outside weather and 240V battery chargers don’t really go together well. Secondly, I often have another requirement for that battery charger, and so I don’t want it tied up semi-permanently on the Maxima. And finally – and it sounds trivial - but I have a healthy respect for the hydrogen gas released during battery charging and I always feel a bit vulnerable pulling on and off those bare alligator clips – especially when the charger doesn’t have an on/off switch on its main body. Maybe some of these things apply to you as well. So what was needed was a low-cost trickle charger, one that could be left connected for long periods to just keep the battery topped-up. (A trickle charger is not the sort that you connect when you want to boost a flat battery into life in a few hours; nope, it’s the type that is connected for a few days or more at a time.) It would be good if it had a long low voltage lead and a readily accessible on/off switch. A quick and easy connection method to the car would also facilitate its use.
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