Truck and Tractor battery tender

[spectrum]

Hello,

I am looking for a way to keep my batteries lasting longer on vehicles that I only start up every 1 to 6 months (with winters that get down to 0F for a handful of days).
One battery is currently a 12V group 31P (model number SLI31PA) on my tractor.
The other is a regular large truck battery for a F350.

I was looking up the deltran battery tender that is the most popular on amazon but several reviews say that there are a lot of lemmon's sold that appear to have faulty wiring possibly doing more harm than good.
It seems I also want to make sure there is some sort of charge controller so it's not overcharging because both these vehicles sit in strong sunlight for much of the year.
Sunway Solar also sells one that has a charge controller sold separately.

Any advice for a simple product I can put together or buy?

Thanks

 

[svetz]

I don't worry too much about DOAs from Amazon as they have great consumer protection policies so easy to get a replacement. I ignore comments like "it arrived broken in three pieces"... those are typically the shipper's fault and easily returned/replaced.

But do pay attention to reliability, this is something you want to place and forget about for 6 months at a time. For something like this I look at the number of stars, the number of votes, and the comments. Even then I'd put a reminder in my calendar to check it every month for the first few months anyway and then increase it to twice a year.

The good news is that lead acid batteries only discharge about 5% per month. So, lets say your battery is a 75 Ah... 75 x 12 = 900 watts/ At 5% per month loss that's 0.05 * 900 /30 day/mon = 1.5 watts per day. So, even a small wattage tender should keep them healthy and lead acid batteries do last longer when kept fully charged.

Hope that helps and you let us know how it goes!

 

[spectrum]

The reviews on amazon were more about how the charger ruined their new battery and no that it was shipped broken.

I do need to get a charger. I just took the truck battery in to get tested just before the 3 year warranty ended. It tested at 443 CCA when it's rated at 880 CCA so they gave me a free replacement.

 

[MikeT357]

I just connect a regular charger to a lamp timer and set the timer for 1 hour per day. Been doing that for many years. Last battery lasted 5 years. Oh, make sure the charger doesn’t need manual reconnect in the event of power failure.

 

[Steve_S]

If you want a charger / maintainer there is few better than NOCO which are available everywhere. They also have some with Pulse Maintaining function which prevents (weel greatly reduces) Sulfation which happens to ALL Lead that sits, even when fully charged (just slower).

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[spectrum]

I want them to build a tractor that work only on electricity

Me too.

btw, I went with a 20 watt panel and cheap PWM charge controller for this project.