I did not take time to read all the threads, but, you live in AZ, high heat, high evaperation of acid in the battery. Acid level got below the top of the plates and the hydrogen gas created by the charging blew the dop of the battery off becasue of a spark that may have happen becasue the acid level was low.

Not the charger's fault, not the battery's, just one of the joys of living in a high heat area.

 

Same here. No way i would leave anything electrical "plugged up" 24/7 to my cars/equipment. Often i disconnect the battery if the vehicle will be sitting for a while.

 

In terms of introducing current, connecting it to a charger every 3 weeks or so isn't much different that leaving it on a battery maintainer. In fact, with the maintainer, the current is much lower and is safer than hooking up an 10 amp charger. And I understand, you are putting on the clamps and then plugging it into the wall, which is the best way. In this case, the spark was probalby inside the battery, and not between a clamp and a terminal, since this occurred while the car was unattended.

Bottom line, the charging current is not the root cause of the OPs problem. An internal short in the battery is the likely culprit. If it didn't blow while in the garage due to being on a maintainer, a spark would have been introduced when he started the car........BOOM.

My battery tender is hard wired to my battery. I use a two prong trailer connector that is routed through the grill, so I never connect or disconnect at the battery. And I don't think (admittedly, I don't know for sure) battery maintainers turn off and on. Once up to the proper voltage, they maintain a very small current - milliamps.

 

Serious question: Why do so many Vette owners feel these cars need battery tenders when sitting for just a few weeks? Mine has sat for that long with no tender and never had a low battery. If I stored it for the winter I'd disconnect the battery instead of putting a battery tender on.

 

What this man says is troof.

If the battery becomes sulfated, it will release hydrogen gas. If there was any small spark, that could have caused the problem.

 

I agree, paint damage would be the least of your worries. On a base or Z51 car the battery is sitting over a bunch of wiring harnesses, the ECM and a couple of other modules. None of those things like battery acid dumped on them. Get some rubber gloves, safety goggles, and start cleaning with baking soda and water, removing every thing that can be removed and cleaning it outside the car. Once you get it cleaned up you will need to replace any damaged body parts and probably will have to paint the frame.

Bill

 

This is not necessarily true. I don't know where you have come up with the term, "floating". But this is the way it works: Your car sits. The clock (or some other element) causes the battery to go down and discharge. The battery charger, trickle charger, maintainer, floater or whatever name you want to give a divice, recharges the battery to keep it from going completely dead. Just like your alternator on the engine does. A high output battery charger will charge it faster. A trickle charger like a (my) Schumacher will recharge it up a little slower (in about eight hours, tops) than a fast charger. It doesn't hurt a battery to go down a little bit, as long as it does not sit completely drained for a long period of time. That's when it gets damaged. It doesn't get damaged just discharging a little. If the battery is going dead in three weeks, then common sense would tell you to recharge it sooner to keep it from going completely dead.------Did you see the guy on the news last week in the gas station who was putting gas in his car and when he walked over to the hose, he brushed up against the car and static electricity from his pants sparked and caught the gas, the car and the pump on fire? And the girl inside the station turned the pump off to keep the whole place from going up? That's what your battery is. A bomb waiting for a spark to set it off. That acid is highly explosive just like gasoline. And when you have something with 110 volts hooked up right there across the terminals that is kicking on and off.---- That's why I hook mine up, charge it up and get the heck outta there!! It's a bomb!! It's going to go off!! Run for your lives!! Seriously, that's just my opinion. And they do blow up. So I try to be careful.--

 

I have two snowmobiles that are kept at my mountain home. Each Spring, when they are put away, I connect each battery to a battery tender jr. They stay connected to their charger for 8 or 9 months until the next winter. I've been doing this for six years on the original batteries.

 

Since we make and sell batteries, we hate people like you!

Normally people with powersport vehicles, buy a battery every season.

 

Originally Posted by Don Nolan View Post
I got a Schumacher trickle charger at Walmarts for $20.00.


I have the same one,I plug it in around November and unplug it around April.

 

Internal fault in the battery or external spark. It takes several hundred amps for a long time or 1000 amps for several seconds to generate enough heat to explode a battery. The wiring for the charger isn't big enough to carry that kind of current even if the 1 amp fuse doesn't blow. The charger had nothing to do with it. On the other hand, a spark very near the battery (hydrogen dissipates in the air) could also be the culprit. My money is on just a freak bad battery.

As far as not using a battery maintainer as it was designed to be used, I've had multiple Battery Tenders hooked to various batteries continuously for up to 4 years with never a problem. That doesn't mean I couldn't have a problem in the future but the whole idea of a Battery Tender is you hook it up and it supplies just enough continuous current to compensate for any load on the battery. Other maintainers cycle on and off to do essentially the same thing. A charger will boil the fluid out of a battery. A maintainer will maintain the charge. You have to disconnect a charger as soon as the battery has a full charge. You have to leave a maintainer connected to keep the charge.

 

We make over 100M car batteries a year, trust me, what I put in my post is accurate and not very complex.

 

 

Seems like a lot of folklore here. First I admit that my battery education dates back to traditional lead-acid, not newer gel or agm batteries. But it is well known that cycling, that is discharging and charging, batteries reduces their life. Keeping them charged prolongs their life. You had to do an equalizing charge to restore the plates, but not applicable to gel or agm.
I have no idea whether anyone has studied how much discharge occurs if you disconnect a maintainer for 3 weeks and then reconnect it to charge the battery, but would seem to defeat the purpose of a low amperage battery maintainer.
Yet, Mr. Murphy tells us that any maintainer can fail and I suppose there is a failure mode that might boil off the water. However, with the thousands of these things in use, you do not hear of such failures, even though they all seem to be made in China.
So I subscribe to the practice of using my maintainer as it was intended, plugged in and keeping the battery fully charged. This is my way of testing whether my expensive Odyssey battery will last longer than usual.
Larry

 

over charging

 

I also live in Arizona. I don't doubt high heat can take its toll but I haven't noticed a higher incidence of battery failures or battery explosions. It seems to me our battery's service life is roughly comparable to everywhere else. I've completely eliminated the possibility of a battery charger/maintainer caused explosion....I don't use one.

 

This thread reminds me why I need to keep the cover on the battery box of the backup sump pump in my basement.

 

The rest of your post seems good, but I question the bolded part.

My understanding:
A trickle charger supplies a continuous low charge. If that charge is not great enough, the battery can still go dead over a long time. If the charge is too great, it can eventually damage the battery. For that reason trickle chargers are not popular now.

A Tender or a maintainer are supposed to be the same thing. They use a low charge to bring the battery up to Full, then shut off or nearly so and monitor the voltage until it drops a slight amount, then bring on the low charge again.

Can the battery experts explain this better?

 

I have never owned a CTEK charger so I can't speak for quality, but I do use Deltrans and have for many years on both my car and Harleys and have never had a problem.

 

We have loads of data that says otherwise. Heat kills batteries. The average battery is AZ lasts one third the time of the same battery in Chicago.