Oh dear no, not on one’s dearly beloved FFRR, surely one needs to be terribly unobtrusive and OEM dahlings!  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” -where’s the fun in that?

MrWold wrote:

I have jubilee clips on the posts with the eyelets on the tightening screws

I use an Aldi Smart charger on all on my cars - it’s a decent bit of kit made by Meridian. Usually £12.99, think it’s same as Ctek underneath.

https://www.aldi.co.uk/auto-xs-car-battery...0347442700

Expecially for TT. You were lucky as I needed to charge it today.

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Hi TT,

I’ll try to get a pic of my “stealth” version today… “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” -where’s the fun in that?

Thanks Chris , I see now, maybe easier.
Never trust a camera

Gremlin500 wrote:

Hi TT,

I’ll try to get a pic of my “stealth” version today…

Hi TT, here you go:

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Excellent thanks Gremlin , I'll have a look, I thought I had plastic under my posts ?
I'll have another look

The Negative post can be undone completely to fit the ring for the CTEK lead.
As I said above, you cannot unscrew the positive post (don’t try!), the entire box can be removed by undoing the 10mm bolt to the right of the terminal box in the pic and carefully prising out the plastic plug (to the left of the box). There is just sufficient slack to flip the box over, and all will be revealed!

You should really disconnect the Battery/batteries, before doing stuff like this, -unless you’re a Gremlin  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” -where’s the fun in that?

Awesome. Thanks Gremlin. I have been puzzling for a while how to hardwire a flying lead for my Noco charger to the posts. That’s a weekend job you’ve just created for me 😂 L405 2017 TDV6 AB
Previous toys:
4.4 TDV8 Westminster. Santorini Black
1976 Lightweight
4.0l P38
2 Disco 3s
Jaguar XJ6 (X350)
Jaguar XJ8 (X308)
Jaguar XK
Jaguar XK8. Confirmed JLR nut.

Great thanks again Gremlin, I'll have a look and go from there
TT

This was sent to me from the company that I bought my battery from when mine would not engage the stop/start.

It appears that the car may not be used enough, leading to a slow degradation in the capacity of the battery. All modern vehicles have on board equipment that have a constant drain on the battery (luxury vehicles with more options are the worse) so a vehicle needs to be used regularly for a reasonable time in order to keep the battery in good condition.
Leaving a vehicle standing for extended periods of time, or even using a vehicle once a week or multiple times but only for short runs is not enough, as you are taking out more than the cars alternator is able to put back into battery the during the time it is being used. The longer period this happens over, the more irreversible this will be leading to early failure.

Do you have a charger which is 7Amp or 10Amp with an AGM setting ?
Or could you tell me which charger you have ?

To recharge an AGM battery the charger needs to get to around 14.7V and needs to be of a reasonable size as well, for your battery I would say 7A and above.

What you have described to me does not appear to be a manufacturing fault, but simply a result of usage.
If a battery has a fault such as an internal short or bad cell, you would loose two volts so the battery voltage would simply be knocked down to 10.2V or there abouts and would not be able to recharge. Also it simply would not start the vehicle before or after charging.

Just to put things into perspective if you have a slow/trickle charger, it would be about 1Amp output, this would take 5 days to recharge a flat battery fully, if indeed it was able to get to the 14.7V before any internal timer would shut the battery off.

If the car simply doesn't get used often enough, periodic recharging would help maintain the battery and extend its life.

We have customers that simply do not use their car enough and do not have the ability to recharge due to where the car is parked etc, and they have accepted the battery will need to changed much more regularly than someone who uses their car an average amount (circa 10,000 miles a year)
Of course if you would like us to recharge and double check your battery for you, that isn't a problem, but you would need to leave it with us for a couple of days at least in order to charge it fully before testing.



Regards,
DENKA

Andrew Tan
a.tan@denkapower.com



DENKA
Offic 2017 SDV8 4.4 silicon silver AB
2012 TDV8 4.4 Stornaway Grey AB
2011 TDV8 4.4 Buckingham Blue
2012 VW V6 3.0 Tougreg

You’re all going to kill me for this

The eagle-eyed among you will have noted that there are TWO pairs of wires attached to my posts?
One pair for the CTEK remote socket hidden in the lower front grille, but what’s the other pair for?

Well, following on from the famous “regeneration trainee nerd” thread and my experience of the excellent Vgate OBDII dongle to monitor live DPF Soot, I bought THIS:

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@Tinman:

I repeat what I said above: the faster you charge a battery, the shorter its life will be, and a 7A charger is a bit overkill, the CTEK MXS 5.0 manual states its good for batteries up to 160Ah for maintenance, so why go bigger?
Of course, the battery companies WANT you to push in a lot of amps, -so they can sell you a new battery! Anyhow, most of us are only “topping up” rather than needing to quickly charge a fully depleted battery, so maybe even 3A is OK especially if you have all night….
Agreed the “use it or lose it” rule applies, so the best alternative it to keep it plugged in to it’s “heart monitor” (CTEK) as we call it!  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” -where’s the fun in that?