Monday, August 1, 2016

Battery Tenders and You (and your sports car)

The reality for many people is that they do not get to drive their sports car every day. One of the issues that arises from lack of driving (other than self loathing) is that the battery in your pride and joy slowly drains away every day it sits idle. Lotus cars are particularly brutal on the battery as the electrical system has a rather strong drain while the car is off. When you add a light weight battery, you also decrease the amount of time the battery can sit idle before it is completely drained. This constant draining shortens battery life and puts unnecessary stress on your alternator when you do finally drive the car again. If you allow the battery to go completely flat, irreversible damage can result from chemical reactions inside the battery and the best case scenario is that battery life is severely shortened.

CTEK Smart Charger
The solution to all this doom and gloom is to use a battery tender. This sweet little device keeps the battery voltage topped up to optimal levels so it is ready to go at 100% when ever you require a little throttle therapy. We choose to carry the CTEK Smart Charger as it is a bit more sophisticated than most chargers and can really extend the useful life of your battery. Using the charger is pretty simple, you can either use the provided clips to temporarily secure it to the battery or use the provided pigtail with ring terminals. The Alfa 4C happens to have extra posts on the battery terminals that make adding charger lead a pretty simple affair.

Alfa 4C ground terminals. The positive post has a similar setup.
Note the two spare studs, perfect for trickle charger leads.

Light weight battery systems are one of the cheapest ways to shed serious pounds on your light weight car. On the Lotus Elise and Exige, our Xtender bracket and raceBATTERY will save 10 lbs on the back of the car while in the Alfa 4C our BB4Cpack will save a substantial 20 lbs of dead weight.
Light weight battery bracket for Alfa 4C