Trickle charge riding lawn mower

[Exterous]

I picked up an older John Deere 325 and I want to put it on a trickle charger for the winter since it can get a tad cold in Michigan. It's a 12v wet battery but I can't find much else about the installed battery. I've got a Noco Genius G3500 that will do 12v at 3.5a and 0.9a but I'm not sure which amp rating I should use? If I default to the lower amps it would just charge more slowly correct?

 

[BoomerD]

Lower amperage for trickle charging.

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John Deere 1.5 Amp Mountable Battery Charger/Maintainer TY26328

John Deere 1.5 Amp Mountable Battery Charger/Maintainer TY26328

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[Exterous]

So use the 0.9amp option then?

 

[BoomerD]

So use the 0.9amp option then?

I'd do that...if it doesn't work, then try the higher setting.

 

[mindless1]

There is no need for even 0.9A, that is just the max setting till it reaches the switchover to trickle charge current which is probably (depends on design) pulsed and closer to 0.01A.

You simply must have a charger that has the trickle feature, and if it does and works properly, you'd also be fine with the charger on a higher current setting as that is only to charge till it switches over to trickle mode.

want to put it on a trickle charger for the winter since it can get a tad cold in Michigan

Possibly it is counter-intuitive since vehicles need their batteries in good condition to start in cold weather, but for longer term storage a battery self discharges less the colder the temperature.

At the same time, the more drained a battery is, the less protection it has against freezing and rupturing the casing and leaking since it's a wet cell design, but I'm talking about ranges like -75F for a fully charged battery vs 20F for a mostly drained.

Once upon a time ago I made a trickle charger for my riding mower. I just grabbed an unregulated 12VDC rated wall wart, (unregulated meaning without a load the voltage floats up to around 15V-16V, and threw some resistors in series till it measured supplying 10mA, or was it 20mA, I forget now.

In retrospect even 10mA-20mA might have been a "little" too high because after a few years I had to top off the water in the battery. Then again it could have instead just been that the engine charging circuit itself caused this electrolytic water loss since the mower had no alternator, charging kept going at a constant rate based on engine RPM even if the battery was full. Well not really constant since it's a VA type circuit that drops current as voltage rises but effectively no end of charge like a regulated alternator would have provided.

 

[Exterous]

Thanks!

 

[Meghan54]

My solution to this problem when I lived on Cape Cod was to throw a charger on the mower’s battery every month while inactive. Charger has read outs for Amy charged, etc. I got a cheap Walmart mower battery to last six seasons doing this. Of course, I’m kinda obsessed with PM, so pulling out the charger and slapping it on the mower monthly is something I don’t consider tedious or the like. Rather like it actually. But I’m odd, so there’s that.

And I can be cheap, so doing it that way saved me from having to buy another charger.

 

[iRONic]

We called it frugal when I lived in Connecticut.

I stored my riding lawn mower underneath my deck. Late fall I took the battery off, brought it in my workshop in the basement. I put it on trickle charge once a month.

9 year old Murray lawn mower. Battery was original and lasted until my son burned the lawn mower down by putting gas into a running machine!