How long can I leave a C5?

[Stempy]

My C5 spends most of it's time hiding away in my lock up where there is no power for a trickle charger or such like. How long should I leave it without running it or charging the battery. The battery is new but not sure how long it will last keeping all the electronics oscillating.

I have a spare good battery and was thinking of hooking that up with jump leads to provide a back up that can be taken away and charged up at regular intervals. It's been static for a couple of weeks now as it generally only comes out at weekends and I've been working the last two and will be this weekend too so won't get a chance to drive it until next weekend probably. Is a four week lay up pushing my luck knowing what C5's are like with low batteries?

[Clogzz]

I would disconnect the battery.
After about a week of idleness, opening doors won't turn the interior lights on anymore, and neither will the pump start.
Maybe that all oscillations are also meant to stop sometime.

[xantia_v6]

Can you mount. a little solar panel to trickle charge the battery?

[Mandrake]

Can you mount. a little solar panel to trickle charge the battery?

Not unless he has a sky light in his garage

[Northern_Mike]

I hate mine so much I use it as little as possible. Prior to yesterday it hadn't run for more than two weeks. It was fine. I've had a 3 week period where it's not been used and it was also fine. Due to sickness it'll be another 3 weeks before it turns a wheel again. I expect no problems

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[Peter.N.]

A solar panel on the roof of the garage would be the way forward, it only has to provide enough current to offset the drain and natural self discharge, something that provides about 100ma should do that, have a look on ebay, solar panels are getting very cheap now, bear in mind that you will only get charge during daylight hours and that the output is never what they say it is. If you get one that will supply around 10 watts it should be OK.

Peter

[qprdude]

Been away for 4 weeks at a time. My x7 battery is not by any means new,(suspect original at 5 years old), and I've had no problems on returning to the car.

[wheeler]

If the battery is decent you should be able to leave it for 4 weeks minimum, once the BSI shuts down after a few minutes the max drain from the battery should only be 0.06 amps.
I used to keep my bike in a garage without electricity & just used a small solar panel on the roof of the garage no problems.

[Peter.N.]

The problem of leaving a car standing on a regular basis is that it 'cycles' the battery, partially discharges it then recharges when you start it. Car batteries are designed to be kept fully charged and only used to start the car then the alternator takes over. If you continually charge and discharge the battery it can considerably reduce its life. Deep cycle such as leisure batteries are designed to be cycled but they only have a life of around 500 cycles, a car battery probably only 10-20 cycles, they would be complete cycles so if the battery is only partially discharged it will do many more.

Its quite likely that in a week it won't discharge sufficiently to do any real harm but it would be a good idea to check what the drain is by connecting an ammeter in series with the battery when its standing, a current of 50ma will equate to just over 1 Ah per day or say 8 Ah in a week but the battery also has a natural self discharge rate which will effectively increase that amount, so if you left it for a month a good battery would be half discharged.

Because of the construction of a car specific battery i.e. a lot of very thin plates it will produce enough power to start a car when its near the end of its life but will have very little reserve capacity, so if you for instance leave the light on it will go down very quickly, so leaving it for a week could flatten it.

Peter

[qprdude]

Well my son has been working offshore, four on four off for over 4 years . His Beamer battery has never given a minutes problem.

[Peter.N.]

If you have a really good and high capacity battery it probably won't, but anything sub standard could suffer.

Peter

[Stempy]

Well maybe I'll trust in the new battery for now and invest in a solar cell for any extended periods longer than a month. Probably next time I will have time to give it a run is next Tuesday, if not it'll be the following weekend, so I'll see what happens then.

[qprdude]

If you're talking about using it once a week, there are millions of cars in the UK that are used at weekends only, and millions more that are used much less. My old neighbour goes out in her Micra about three times a year, and it sits outside as she ain't got a garage. Sorry, but I just don't understand all the sudden worry.

[Stempy]

The worry is that mark 1 C5's and flat batteries aren't conducive to a stress free existence. I don't want to jump in, start it up, then find out that half the electronics have gone haywire and have to spend two hours going through some crazy reset procedure in the hope that all will return to normal. I'm talking about leaving it for four weeks on this occasion and maybe longer in the future.

[Northern_Mike]

Your post should read ; "The worry is that mark 1 C5's aren't conducive to a stress free existence".