My wife's car is often not used for a couple of weeks and even though the battery is fairly new, its sometimes not able to start the car because of lack of volts. This situation is not helped by the fact that she only drives short distances.If I remember, I take the car out for a run to charge it up. I've seen solar powered car battery chargers which trickle charge the battery via the cigarette lighter. Does anyone use such a charger ? and what are the best ones - 1 w / 1.5w / 2w or what ?
We had one on our mini. It wasn't great. I remember reading somewhere (maybe here?) someone calculated the size of panel required to adequately charge a battery was like 2m x 1m or something.
Hi all I bought one for the wife's car, made no difference. If the cars not being used for a couple of weeks, best thing to do is to disconnect the battery!
I got an AA Solar charger off of Amazon, and found it to be very good. My review is on The AA charger plugs into the OBD-II port (to the left of the drivers steering wheel, in the footwell area) as it means I don't need to run any cables through the engine bay. I have mine left on the dash, where it happily keeps the battery topped off, even with the usual cloudy Irish weather. I left the car for 3 weeks without running her, as I was out of the country on business, and she turned over perfectly - before I got the charger, she'd struggle to turn over as the battery would be kinda flat if I left it that long.
