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| Simo Zitha and Caster Sithole at Battery Centre in Pietermaritzburg. |
SA’s most popular SUV, the Toyota Fortuner, loses almost 20% of its battery charge in four days while standing. Older batteries drop their charge faster on cold days. This means four weeks’ standing will drain a battery.
The second worst thing you can do — as many people also did — is to idle the parked vehicle for a few minutes once a week, as the charge required to turn the starter motor hacome from the battery and new cars need to drive for about 15 minutes for the alternator to replace this charge. A few
minutes of idling in the garage only adds to air pollution and repeating this exercise every few weeks will drop the charge that much faster to zero.
minutes of idling in the garage only adds to air pollution and repeating this exercise every few weeks will drop the charge that much faster to zero.
See batteries like balloons
In layman’s terms, the battery like is balloon made from strong rubber. Once fully deflated, it is initially easy to inflate a little bit, but as the air pressure builds up inside the balloon, the inflater’s cheek muscles has to work a lot harder to force air into the balloon. In this analogy, the average car alternator has weak cheeks that can only “blow” out a relatively low amperage, like a baby trying to inflate a bicycle tyre by blowing into it. As soon as the voltage in the flat battery are higher than the average car alternator’s abilities, that alternator will not charge the battery any further, as it cannot increase its amperage.
Some bakkies and most trucks have another problem — their alternators are too strong and will continue forcing current into a battery to the point where it starts smoking. This is when the battery owner storms into battery shops and demand a new battery, only to be pointed to the line at the bottom of the invoice, which states in bold print, “warranty does not cover flat battery”.
Witness Wheels spoke to Simo Zitha and Caster Sithole at Battery Centre in Pietermaritzburg who have seen several such irate customers in the past weeks, and they say there is a solution to the problem.
Trickle charge is the answer
Sithole said the best thing vehicle owners can do for batteries that are parked for weeks at a time is to invest in a smart trickle charger, which sells for less than R500. Zitha agreed this is the best investment you can make to keep the expensive battery charged, adding the trickle charger will even resuscitate dead batteries, as it sends current at constant amps into any size battery, be it for cars or trucks, but stops when the battery is full.
Meanwhile, most battery shops are doing their best to help customers by trickle charging their dead batteries overnight while lending their customers a battery. We recommend vehicle owners with flat batteries make use of this service, but please, ask the staff, don’t steal our batteries!
