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js305 12-27-2012 20:09:21 184.79.57.233 Report to Moderator

Our volunteer fire department with eight trucks used to have a continuing battery problem. There are times that certain trucks would not be needed for a month at a time, and then would go to five fires in a weekend. We tried trickle chargers, starting the trucks once a week and letting them run for thirty minutes (that didn't work out well at all...), putting them on a timer coming on once a day for an hour, and several other methods to try and keep the batteries from going south. Didn't seem to matter what we did, a battery would last a year and would have to be replaced. We finally ran onto some chargers that turn off completely once the battery is charged to a certain level. They have a timer circuit that "checks" the charge every ten minutes or so, if it needs charging it comes on and brings it back up and shuts off again. We have been using these on all of our trucks with pretty good success. Battery life is still shorter than normal but normal is different in this situation. We now get about 3 to 5 years out of our batteries. These chargers are made by Schauer, we leave them plugged in 24/7 and rarely have a surprise. We can tell when we have a problem ahead of time by watching the activity on the meter on the charger. I won't make this longer to explain that part. I don't know if they make a six volt version or not, easy enough to find out. [Reply]   [No Email]