Schumacher Battery Maintainer Questions

[dogememe]

I'm building a custom piece of software that runs on a Windows PC to read data from the GM class 2 data bus. More on that later but long story short I'm sitting in the vehicle for extended periods of time with the key in the on position. Not like a super long time but long enough... maybe 30m at a time. I'm also periodically starting it and running it for maybe a minute at a time.

In addition to this project, I generally will not be driving the vehicle much, and when I do drive it, well I have a 5 minute commute and then I drive another 5 minutes to get lunch so it's just about the worst duty cycle for a car battery. So I decided to get a battery maintainer!

I have one somewhere but instead of digging for that I picked up a Schumacher SC1678. This is a 2A charger/maintainer that supports regular, AGM, and LFP batteries. Obviously I'm using it in regular mode as I have a traditional Interstate battery in the truck... nothing fancy.

Well yesterday when I was messing with the vehicle it seemed to be working fine... 2/4 bars were full and the third was blinking. This morning I go out to check and instead of showing the battery status as full (which I would have expected to see, or at least at the fourth charging bar), none of the bars were lit up and the red battery X icon was on.

The battery works fine... it tests good with a battery tester... and the connections are solid. What could cause this?

So I guess I have two main questions:

1. Is this battery maintainer just a piece of garbage?

2. Is starting the vehicle repeatedly then leaving the key on and back and forth with the battery maintainer on it screwing up the maintainer?

Thanks!

 

[loneryder]

II have several of them that I've used for years. No issues. 2 amps may not be enough to recover overnight with your usage. You may need a "floating" maintainer.

 

[Hirev]

There is no real standards on battery maintainers chargers I have a bunch of them I had some that just shuts off after a certain amount of time and don't seem to come back on. some do eventually. One of my favorite charger these days is Mroinge battery charger/maintainer 2/5 amp sold on Amazon.

2. Is starting the vehicle repeatedly then leaving the key on and back and forth with the battery maintainer on it screwing up the maintainer?

I don't know never done this myself but more than a few auto mechanic on Youtube seem to leave them going when working on cars in their shop. Your 2 amp might not be enough for doing what you are doing here. Just a guess on my part.

 

[f355spider]

From looking online, this appears to be a solid battery maintainer. The red X indication, means the battery tender is detecting a "bad" battery. Your testing shows it is fine. Here is what I would do next:

1) Read the instructions (I cannot find a copy online) and get the details of what constitutes "bad" and how it determines that
2) Try it again on subsequent nights and see if you get different results
3) Try it on a different car. If it does the same thing, it could indeed be a defective unit.
4) You may want to have the battery tested with a carbon pile tester.

Good luck!
PS: I would use the ring battery terminal connectors if it came with them, and thread the plug out through the grill. I have done this on all my cars and truck to make it easy and convenient to connect up. Also, it prevents premature wear on your hood cable release...yup broke mine from I presume opening a couple times a week to connect up. Lesson learned why they come with those.