Thanks to all that responded about my battery drain/charging/charger
problem. I have "stuff" to check out now. The one interesting thing that I
have checked out is that the boot light is not staying on when the lid is
closed............so I'll keep checking.
On 2/5/07, Monte/Jane Morris <montejane@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have a recurrent (is that a pun?) problem with the 79B loosing it's
> battery charge. Paul has given me some advice on tracking it down, which I
> have not had the chance to do yet but it's most probably the steady drain
> caused by the clock and radio memory (I have a battery disconnect sitting in
> the shop that I MUST install one day:-). Here in Missouri, the temps have
> been dropping down below zero (F, for you over the pond) and therefore this
> discharging process has accelerated from usually taking a couple of weeks
> to where it only takes a couple of days of non-driving to discharge the
> single 12V battery. Thanks to advice from Paul (and his website), I now am
> ready to connect a charger via the cigarette (cigar?) lighter but I
> have four charging questions:
> 1. I have always disconnected the alternator when I charge, or boost, the
> battery. Is this necessary?
> 2. We travel many months of the year and this year there is the
> possibility that we will be gone 6-8 months straight. The first year I did
> nothing to the batteries and had to replace three of the five vehicle
> batteries after 5 months of travelling; two were frozen solid:-). Last year
> I bought trickle chargers/battery maintainers (Harbor Freight) for each
> battery, pulled them and put them in the shop and plugged them into timers
> which only allowed two hours of charging/day. I didn't have to replace any
> batteries this time around, but wonder is two hours/day enough or too much
> in order to not reduce the battery life?
> 3. I have a Shumacker 2/15/125 amp, fully automatic charger. When the
> 79's battery goes dead (the battery is only a year old), I put the charger
> on at 15 amps and usually within 10-20 minutes the light goes on (sometimes
> almost immediately) that shows fully charged, and the car usually starts
> fine. If I instead use the 2 amp setting it will NOT show fully charged and
> take several hours to get there. Is this normal, or is something wrong with
> the charger or is there another possible problem with the car instead of the
> battery?
> 4. Most of the time when I put the charger on the car, it will charge for
> a while then the fully charged light will luminate and the indicator needle
> will quickly bounce back and forth between no charge and fully charged. I
> once had another Shumacker charger just like it that did the same thing. Is
> this normal, or a problem with the charger? Does it hurt to leave it plugged
> in overnight (on automatic) if the charger does this most of the night?
> I guess that was 5 questions:-).
> Monte
>
>
>
> --
> Monte and Jane Morris
> 1967 MGB, British Racing Green
> 1979 MGB, Carmine, Duel HIF's
> http://picasaweb.google.com/montejane/MGS/photo#5001948439113957394
>
--
Monte and Jane Morris
1967 MGB, British Racing Green
1979 MGB, Carmine, Duel HIF's
http://picasaweb.google.com/montejane/MGS/photo#5001948439113957394
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