I’ve been keeping my riding mower battery on a trickle charger. One of those $10 Harbor Freight ones.
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I keep the leads permanently connected to my battery.... and the charger is plugged into a nearby receptacle. Roll into the garage and just plug in... takes all of about 3 seconds. I think I’m on about the 15th year of my battery.
“I keep the leads permanently connected to my battery”
ditto ... hanging out of the hood ...
Only thing is my riding mower has one of those batteries you can’t (easily) open to add water to, so at some point it’s going to fail due to water loss, unless I want to try prying the vent caps off (they’re flush with the top of the battery, not designed to be removed).
I just had to replace the battery on my pickup truck because it failed, opened up the vent caps and it was less than half full. No wonder it failed. The bad alternator didn’t help, I suspected for a while that something was wrong with it, it started making noise like has a bad bearing, put a new one in and the voltage is more stable and doesn’t drop as much when I turn the blower fan on high. Think one of the diodes on the old one is bad, going to take to to an alternator shop and have them test/rebuild it for a spare.