mstein274 wrote:
OR just the day before use.
Mike
I would suggest neither. A hour or two plugged in every week is probably ideal for the needs of your battery. An hour or two every two weeks should be fine as well. It's not religion, so skipping a top-off charge now and then won't ruin your day, but it's a good habit to get into a regular routine.
If you are lazy like me, and tend to put doing things off more often than you should, just buy one of the cheap programmable consumer rated wall plug timers marketed for turning things on and off to suit your schedule, and let it do the work for you. Just make sure it is a fairly good quality model that can handle the current needs of the Vagabond charging circuit, and also allows programming periods of a week or longer. Actually, as long as it is a good quality device, a 24 hr program model might also work OK. Just set it to deliver a few minutes of charge each day, and after a week, see if that's enough to keep the battery topped off.
Charging once a week gives you a bit more latitude in charging time. Just set the time for a couple hours and you're good to go. If you have to charge every day (can't find a weekly program device), experiment with times until you find the minimum number of charge minutes needed to keep the idle Vagabond battery "just" fully charged after a week or two on the program. I'm guessing that would likely be around four or five minutes of charging time every 24 hrs. That's just a wild guess, but the goal is give the battery just enough energy to replace what it loses from self-discharge while idle, and that's all. Anything extra only serves to create heat in the battery itself (bad), and keeps the chemical lab inside the battery working beyond it's contract to produce that heat. That's bad too.....
I hope that helps,
Voyager