[Pez]

Hello everyone:

Just got back from a three week trip to Italy and came home to a dead as a door nail XLR. Yup, toe's-up. Apparently, if you are not going to run the car for an extended period of time, you need to use a battery tender.

This is according to the "Road Side Asistance Mechanic". He said that the XLR's have guite a bit of electronic monitoring and that it will drain a battery if not used on a regular basis. Everything is O.K., now.

Here's one for you... When you fill-up and the price is $1.85-2.00 per gallon, just smile because gas in Europe is 1.27 Euro per liter or about $5.00 per gallon.

It's great to be back in the USA!!! Pez :flag

 

[Eyedoc]

Glad you're back

Good to hear you had a good trip.

I'll try tio give you a call this weekend.

Maybe we can get a picture of our two XLR's with some Washington "color" in the background.

What do you think about the Iwo Jima Memorial?

I used to have the same problem with my Corvette and have a battery charger for just such occassions.

Anyone know if those systems that plug in through the lighter work very weel for "maintaining" the battery?

 

[rick1827]

Not very well. On cars that have lots of electronics and sit in storage over the winter I would reccommend a high quality battery trickle charger. They do a great job and you can even add a quick connect to your battery that makes hooking it up about as easy as pluggin in a lamp.

The ones that I have seen and tried using the lighter are really for cars who's batteries are just short of enough juice to turn the car over and even then they won't turn over a big V-8 like a corvette engine or pick-up truck.

I recently installed a small 1.2 AMP charger into my XLR. It is about the size of regular coffee cup. It was very easy to mount under the hood. So, now when I park my baby for her winter nap, I simply run an extention cord over to it and plug her in. The system slowly keeps the battery charged and automatically shuts off when battery is full or if any problems are detected. I bought the whole system at NAPA for $35.00 and it took about 10 minutes to install. Very easy to do. I had the same system on my Corvette which use to eat batteries and never had another problem when I went to fire her up in the spring.