Battery Maintenance

🔧 Battery Maintenance

Tips and advice to preserve efficiency and lifespan

Having a dead battery is an unpleasant experience. Here is some useful advice and tips to keep your battery in the best possible condition, ensuring your vehicle's reliability.

The battery is a fundamental element of the so-called power triangle: the starter motor, the alternator, and the battery itself. If any of these components is not working properly, the vehicle will not start.

🔋 Self-Discharge

All batteries, even when unused, will discharge over time.

Self-discharge occurs at a rate that varies depending on temperature. Higher ambient temperatures lead to faster self-discharge:

  • At 10°C (50°F) the battery loses approximately 0.1 volts per month
  • At 30°C (86°F) the loss reaches 0.4 volts per month

In addition to natural self-discharge, the battery may also power additional electrical loads, such as security immobilizers and ECU memory.

To avoid this consumption, some choose to remove the battery from the vehicle or disconnect it. Unfortunately, this precaution is not enough to stop the natural self-discharge process, which will lead to a voltage drop and, over time, damage to the battery.

💡 Useful tip: Taking care of your battery by maintaining its charge means saving money and avoiding buying a new battery. As a good practice, especially for batteries installed on seasonal vehicles, store the battery fully charged, remembering to recharge it periodically and especially before putting it back into service.

⚡ Sulfation

During normal battery use, sulfate crystals can form and deposit on the plates inside the battery. This happens when the battery is not stressed, for example during periods of inactivity.

From a technical standpoint, the deposit of these crystals affects the battery's capacity, which will have greater difficulty maintaining a charge. The battery's life cycle will be shortened as a result.

For proper battery operation, we recommend performing a full 14-16 hour charge periodically.

✅ Reversible Sulfation

Occurs in case of temporary non-use and can be corrected with a full battery charge.

❌ Permanent Sulfation

Found in batteries that have remained unused for a fairly long period (e.g., several months). Unfortunately, in this case, recovering the battery is practically impossible, and you will need to purchase a new battery.

🔌 Charging

Maintaining the battery's charge is very important for the battery's life itself; the choice of battery charger is therefore one of the most important criteria for proper maintenance.

⚠️ Fundamental rule:
It is necessary to choose a battery charger compatible with the technology of the battery in use (Flooded, AGM/Gel, or Lithium) and consider, as a general rule, that the nominal current of the charger must be equal to 1/10 of the capacity of the battery in use.

RedOx srl – Technical Office – Proper Maintenance Advice