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
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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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