hi sages- comparison shopping for a low priced battery tender to maintain a battery which is not used for long periods of time. about at the end of my rope with low quality parts from the far east especially china; so dont want to make another mistake. looking at a tender for 24.00 from schumacher. called the batterymaintainer. called the manufacturers 800 number and the rep told me it is in fact a tender not a trickle charger which is manufactured in mexico. would like your opinion on this . always thought schumacher made items of quality, but maybe times have changed. maybe superdan our electrical guru could opine on this but certainly other sages are welcome to put in their two cents. heard of a brand deltran too but dont know who sells it. also any opinions on this aerosol from napa which is marketed as a battery terminal corrosion preventer? sprays a blue clear light paint. thanks tons. bob f

I've got a bunch of the very inexpensive battery maintainers from Harbor Freight - they run ~$5 on sale, ~$10 not on sale. I've only had one fail, and that one failed safe (open, no short). I bought a number as cheap power supplies for other projects. Right now I can't find them on the HF web site.

I've taken one apart; it has a DIP chip & discrete electronics inside and seems to produce a fixed 14.4V pulsating DC - can't remember if its half or full wave - at <~1A max. Seems to work fine - got 10 years out of my show car's battery using one; w/o it, used to get 1~2 years.

I think it was made in China. It seems OK for what I use it for. If I was worried about it, I'd put a fuse on both sides for safety.

They also have the $40.00 battery chargers that last a season. I doubt if the wally world ones are of the same quality as my $300.00 unit. But then again maybe my Schumacher is made in china and priced USA

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Chris'
Autobody
Restoration
Service

I have 4 chargers. Two are Battery Tenders (1.5 amp, 5 amp) these are green in color and are great. The 1.5 amp cost about $50 and the 5 amp was about $90. Zero problems with these. The other two are the Schumacher's 1.5 amp Maintainer and the 2,8,12 charger, both bought from Wal-mart. The 1.5 I haven't had any problems with but it only 5 months old. The 2,8,12 charger still charges fine but the LED segments are going out. I can still tell what its doing but just bearly. The Schumacher chargers cost me half of what the Battery Tenders cost. I don't plan to buy another Cheap charger again.

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