Clicking sound with trickle charger

Sam Spade wrote:

booster wrote:
He also said he knows driving every few weeks isn't always enough, which is absolutely true, as it can take hours to refill a cold lead acid battery so you slowly go downhill on charge.

With a healthy fully charged battery that is absolutely NOT true.
The self-discharge loss should be so small that a reasonable vehicle charging system can make up for 3 weeks worth in about 15 minutes......or less.

And trusting the onboard converter/controller to take care of the batteries over a long period of non-use is a mixed bag too. Some (many?) float them too high and tend to boil off the water, just like a cheap trickle charger. That kind tends to recover the charge slowly too. A good 2 or 3 stage controller, OTOH, will charge rapidly AND maintain the charge properly without excessive electrolyte loss.....like a smart tender type charger.

Specifics are needed. Generalities are almost always false and misleading.

You missed the point of what he said. He does not have a full disconnected battery. He has not been disconnecting the starting battery in the past and in 3 weeks the battery would be down. It is very common for a starting battery to go low from parasitic losses in 3 weeks. Even if it only 20-30% down, it will not get full in a normal drive, it will take hours. Take a look at a charging profile to full and see how long the last 5% of charge takes. Starting batteries in cold weather always walk down over time because they don't get all the way full in the time you have driving, so they run in the middle of the charge range most times. I have monitored ours here in Minnesota, and even with nearly and hour of commuting a day, the batteries would settle in at about 70% full for most of the winter.

You will notice that I said that if it is a multistep charger, it will be the best for all the batteries. Batteries recover better and last longer with a multistep charger that has enough capacity to stir the electrolyte in wet cells, so the shore charger will do better than a tender if he is not starting already totally full. Nearly every class b that has a separator like he does is new enough to also have a multistep charger, and if he does, IMO, it will do a great job on all the batteries, without the need to be hooking up anything else.

Obviously, you think otherwise, and that is your opinion.