Well, I don't know but I guess my practice of charging the battery periodically has worked pretty well-17 years and counting with the 78 C3 and 94 Mustang GT Costco batteries…………

I only keep a battery tender on my 10 Z06 battery. Based on lots of years of experience, the factors that effect battery life most are how often you use the car AND how much road vibration is the battery exposed to…more vibration, less battery life. Vibration is what kills Lawn Tractor batteries most, also.

 

just because they are made in the same factory or even the same line doesn't mean they are the same battery.

 

When my current battery needs replacing I will be installing an Odyssey Extreme AGM or a Northstar AGM. I heard many complaints about the Optima batteries so I intend to steer clear of them. JMHO....

 

wcsinx, as I've stated in this thread before, stories about our products are everywhere, both good and bad, because our products are everywhere in large quantities. If you want to choose to focus on the negative stories about our products and ignore the negative stories about every other major brand on the market, you are welcome to do that and your motivation for doing so is understood.

The Optima brand has changed hands a few times since the 1970s, but it's not like each sale resulted in the new owner starting from scratch with nothing more than a brand name. In every instance, new ownership continued to develop and improve upon the original design, including our current ownership, which dates back 14 years. If you want to exclude a battery from being considered relevant to a conversation because it was manufactured by different owners, in a different facility or with a different logo on the label, you are welcome to do that as well.

As for our production facility, I don't know how much more honest I can be about it. I acknowledged it's location on the first page of this thread and even corrected Samason, that production began there in 2007, not 2009. It's not like we try to hide it, in fact, we're very proud of the facility, the people who work there and the quality of the products we produce there. We even have a video tour of the facility posted on our website.

REELAV8R, I appreciate your feedback. Wind chill is a valid concern when it comes to you spending time out in the cold. My point was a battery will still perform the same in -50°F with no wind, as it will with 50mph winds. Whether it has an engine compartment keeping the battery warmer with ambient heat is not a function of battery performance.

jb78L-82, vibration can be hard on batteries, but batteries that see seasonal use, including those in lawn tractors and other powersports applications often fall victim to sulfation due to lack of proper voltage maintenance when the battery is not in use. 7t9l82, you are correct in stating that batteries made in the same facility or on the same line may not be the same. We do manufacture our RedTops, BlueTops and YellowTops in the same facility, but they do have different characteristics. The challenge for consumers is trying to figure out if the battery they are purchasing really is different than the next brand in any meaningful way. Contracts expire and new contracts get signed on a regular basis, so accurately tracking who makes what for whom is nearly impossible for anyone outside of the industry. Some retailers even use multiple suppliers, based on a variety of factors, including battery sizes and geographic locations.

Jim McIlvaine
eCare Manager, OPTIMA Batteries
www.pinterest.com/optimabatteries

 

Maybe Optima should think about stepping into this millennium with a Lithium Ion battery. Make a line of 850CCA or higher batteries with a separate charge controller module and I would consider paying $350-400 for that technology. I've used the spiral cell units since they were introduced by Gates but, not presently a fan of your technology. Maybe if it were more common knowledge that a Optima discharged below 12VDC won't accept a charge until it's voltage is brought up by paralleling a battery with it would have saved me tons of frustration with your product in the past but, I'm not coming back. I do appreciate the support you give to the "Street Car Challenge" series, I guess if I ever build a contender it will have a red top in it but, it might be a gutted one with a LI-ion hiding inside......20lb weight advantage!

 

I'm not focusing on the negative. It's just there are so many more negative stories out there. You are the one focusing on the positive as is evidenced by your myopic view of threads full of negative comments where you choose to focus on a single positive post. You know, that thread you claim I didn't read?

Reputations, good and bad, are earned not given. Apparently you believe that all these stories of premature Optima battery failure are made by people that have an axe to grind against your employer. I assure you, this is not the case. I have no motivation to slag Optima, but I must take the posts of "BEST BATTERY EVUR!!!111!!" coming from an Optima sales rep with a heaping serving of salt when I see said stories whilst NOT seeing a similar set of stories about any number of other manufacturers who sell orders of magnitude more batteries than Optima.

 

Say again? A warmer battery is one that produces more power when were talking about above or below 0*.
A warm engine compartment will keep the battery warm longer without the additional cooling of the wind. Perhaps all night.
On a windy night parked with the grill facing the wind, not so much.

You've heard about the issues with lithium batteries right? Those little suckers get HOT. They also burst into flames. If it does you are not going to put it out with a fire extinguisher. Lithium metal burns real good, with no good way to put it out.
Remember hearing about the new Boeing 787 aircraft batteries? Lithium ion.
More than one airplane has been forced to land and burned due to lithium ion batteries that were on board in some device.

Not the aircraft batteries which would be much larger, like a car battery.

A well known cargo carrier had a lithium ion battery in a package overheat and catch fire. It could not be extinguished despite several fire extinguishers used to exhaustion in the attempt. It eventually burned out on it's own.

 

I'm with OtimaJim on this one. Wind will only cool the battery faster than without wind but only to the ambient temp. If it's -10 degrees outside and once the battery reaches -10, it's not going to get colder just because of the wind, it's only going to get -10 degrees. It will just get there faster than without wind, or an insulating engine compartment. If it's that cold, engine compartment or not, the battery is going to get down to -10 in a very short time. I really don't see how this is relevant to the battery. I could see if you were comparing two batteries' performance at the same cold temp.

I'm with you all the way on this one. People may complain about the AGM batteries, wait until they try to use a lithium ion or LIPO batteries. Draw one of those down too low and then try to recover it like an AGM, and then POOF! I deal with them a lot with and they are not very forgiving. Handled properly and they work better than anything else out there, improperly and they can be very dangerous. I've watched them first hand catch fire, albeit intentionally.

 

Correct. Obviously the battery will not cool below ambient.
Park your car in an unheated garage overnight and it will cool much slower than if parked outside in a 30 mph wind.

In the garage it may not even cool to ambient depending on the mass under the hood, size of the cooling system, transmission mass etc, so then the battery as well as everything else under the hood is warmer.

Since battery performance is directly related to temperature then the sooner the battery reaches ambient, if that is a temp such as 0*, the sooner it's performance is compramised.
Wind accelerates the cooling of all the mass under the hood, battery included.

 

Solid LT1, I appreciate your feedback regarding new products and will certainly forward it to the appropriate parties. We do what we can regarding educating folks about deeply-discharged batteries (the cutoff point for most chargers is usually around 10.5 volts), but feel free to share our parallel charging video with anyone you think could benefit from watching it-
You don't need to wait until you build a contender to have fun at the Ultimate Street Car Association events. Come out with the car you have now, just for the experience. You'll get to run at Auto Club Speedway, we'll put you on TV and I promise to snap some really nice action shots of your car.

wcsinx, I wish you could come into the office some time and shadow the folks who handle warranties on some of the other accounts. It would probably change your perspective of the industry entirely. Do all manufacturers make products with defects? Absolutely. I've never said otherwise. However, in the majority of cases “bad” batteries returned under warranty are found to be discharge-only, meaning they work fine with a proper charge. This is not a unique situation for any brand, but the nature of the products and how consumers deal with issues. Go talk to the alternator folks and they'll point out similar consistencies within their industry- “bad” alternators that come back covered in belt dust with a discolored pulley. People often look at the end result and assume a product was damaged not by other factors, but because of some defect within the product itself, when that is often (but not always) not the case.

As I've said before, you will see more stories about our products, both positive and negative, because of the volume we sell. We also focus heavily on an enthusiast market, meaning someone enthusiastic enough to register on an online forum to talk about their experiences with their vehicles. My neighbor who had the battery in their SUV die on them in February isn't going online to talk about their experience. Neither is my other neighbor who had their minivan battery go belly-up the month before. They just want their vehicles to start and don't care enough to share their experiences with anyone online, as is the case for most of the consumers out there.

REELAV8R, I think we're all trying to say the same thing here. Maybe I should explain it this way. I happen to have an Edge Tuner on my Excursion, which measures oil and coolant temperature for me. I watch it like a hawk in the wintertime, because my truck has 240,000 miles on it and doesn't want to run smooth until the oil hits 132�°. Once my truck sits outside for a few hours, those temperatures are going to match the outside air temperature on start up, whether the wind is blowing or not. They may reach the outside air temperature a little faster if the wind is blowing more, but after a few hours, it really doesn't matter and it definitely doesn't matter if the vehicle sits overnight.

If a battery is in a warmer environment because the engine is keeping it warmer or because it's in a heated garage, that temperature has nothing to do with the performance of the battery itself, but rather the environment the battery is in. Does that make sense?

Jim McIlvaine
eCare Manager, OPTIMA Batteries
www.pinterest.com/optimabatteries

 

Link to sources showing your monstrous market share? And maybe just once try not to give your broken record canned response of how you're the largest manufacturer of AGM batteries. Compare the amount of AGM batteries (not just Optimas) to flooded batteries out there, and you'll be dwarfed to the tune of 2-3 orders of magnitude.

You cater to a niche market. I'm not saying this to slam you. I'm simply stating a fact. The majority of motorists are not going to pony up 4x the cost of a flooded battery for an AGM battery regardless of manufacturer.

Oh I agree that someone who spends so much more on an AGM battery is probably going to be more vocal about it, but you're absolutely wrong about people not posting up experiences about bottom and mid-tier products. The Internet is quite simply bursting at the seams with such stories. And I contend that ANY product with a statistically significant failure rate will be reflected thus regardless of its price point or target demographic. One glance through the Amazon reviews should confirm this for you.

 

Hmm interesting. What say you about this then?

Taken from this web site.

http://72.10.52.249/index.php?option...id=29&Itemid=1

 

If you would do a test on your assumption you would find that you are wrong.

Many years of experience has taught me the effectiveness of wind on cooling inanimate objects. Specifically engines and the items close to those engines.
On an aircraft engine, be it internal combustion or turbine, just plugging the intake flow and exhaust flow of air through the engine or cowling will allow that engine to retain enough heat to be above ambient even at very low temperatures with wind.
Failing that and the engine will achieve ambient temp due to the cooling effect of air passing through and likely not start the next day (8 hours later) should that ambient temp be significantly below freezing.

Give it a try, I think you'd be surprised by the results.

Park facing the wind on a 10* night. The engine will achieve ambient much sooner than if parked in a protected area, in which case it may not even achieve ambient.
Many batteries are located in the forward corner of an engine compartment, and those that are not still cool to ambient given that the engine does so as well.

A mechanic who does not plug our aircraft engines on a 0* night or even a 15* night is going to cause a delay in our departure the next morning when the engine will not light off because it has reached ambient temperature. Not guessing, it has happened.

An engine that has been plugged will still indicate a positive temperature on the EGT and will light off, even in 0* weather.
Just plugged, not blanketed or heated in any way. Just to prevent the air from flowing through.

 

wcsinx, Optima batteries are sold domestically at Autozone, Advance Auto, Pep Boys, O'Reilly, Sam's Club, NAPA, Interstate Batteries, CSK and many other locations worldwide- tens of thousands in total. Most AGM brands are sold domestically and some don't even produce enough batteries in a calendar year to have one for each of our retail locations. In the scope of overall battery sales, AGM batteries have a small (but growing) percentage of the automotive marketplace. If you define a “niche market” as one that consists of millions of units in use around the world, then yes, we definitely fit that description.

I'm glad you mentioned online retailers, because I hadn't mentioned Summit, Jeg's, 4 Wheel Parts or any of the countless other online retailers selling our products. That is important, because the retailers I mentioned specifically are all authorized to sell our products. Many online retailers, including some of the biggest names out there, are not authorized retailers of our products. Optima-authorized retailers only ship our products in approved shipment packaging, answer their own toll-free phone number during normal business hours, adhere to and honor the Optima factory warranty policy and provide their own in-house warranty program. Take a look at some of the negative feedback about our products on some big-name retail sites and you'll find many complaints about products arriving damaged and/or the retailer refusing to provide warranty service. Optima's reputation ends up taking the hit due to poor service from a retailer we have no control over, because someone didn't want to spend an extra $5 to buy from an authorized seller.

REELAV8R, I'm clearly doing a poor job of explaining myself and I apologize. The ambient temperature surrounding a battery is a result of the environment creating that temperature, not the battery creating that temperature. Pick out any temperature you'd like, whether it is -30°F or +130°F and then add or subtract winds of 20mph. The battery will perform the same for those conditions, whether the wind is blowing or it is dead calm. Extreme temperatures either way will impact performance and lifespan, but blowing wind won't make a battery work any better or worse. I've been running an Edge tuner in my Excursion for years that measures engine coolant and transmission temperatures and as I've posted before, those temperatures match the ambient air after about four or five hours of sitting in the parking ramp at work, just the same as they do after four or five days of sitting out in the open at the airport parking lot.

Given your screen name, I expected you to start talking about planes at some point. The reality is, we're bringing up airplanes and Excursions on a Corvette forum, discussing a scenario that isn't even relevant to Corvettes that never get used in cold weather, which is just about all of them.

Jim McIlvaine
eCare Manager, OPTIMA Batteries
www.pinterest.com/optimabatteries

 

OptimaJim thank you for an amazing job on providing all the information you have. You may have saved my red top as it was discharged to 4V. im using another red top in parallel. I went to use a battery charger of my brother and it says for led-acid only. He used it on his optima while he doesnt drive it. What kind of damage is this doing to his battery?

Also in the video it says use 10amp but most chargers are 2-7, only really expensive ones can do 10amp, is one that high needed ? Im from australia so im not sure if your chargers are compatible here.

As for wcsinx, you have provided no information at all and contributed nothing. Go buy a hyundai and use your $60 battery on that.

 

Hi R6n350GT, Optima batteries are lead-acid batteries, so using chargers designed for lead-acid batteries is fine. We recommend a maximum of 10 amps (2-7 is fine), because many chargers stateside go from 10 amps up to 50, 100 or even higher. Most batteries are in the range of 50Ah, so if someone plugs an unregulated charger in at a really high rate and forgets about it for even a few hours, the results can be very bad.

Jim McIlvaine
eCare Manager, OPTIMA Batteries
www.instagram.com/optimabatteries

 

Thanks Jim