Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

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

Thanks, I hope I haven't hurt the battery. I've been leaving it plugged in all the time between jobs which has been weeks.

Don't worry. You didn't hurt it. The Vagabond charging circuit was undoubtedly selected with that capacity battery in mind, and I (for one) wouldn't worry about cooking it in that short a period of time.

Your battery can be expected to do it's job for say 4-5 years in a perfect world before it loses enough storage capacity to qualify as a better paper weight than a battery. How you care for the battery when it is not being used over time is one important factor in how many of those "best case" years you might get out of your battery, but the key is "over time".

Don't sweat over the occasional lapses in your charging routine. Just make sure that the lapses don't become the routine....

Voyager

thanks

I have my Vegabond II plugged in around the clock. Almost never gets used during the summer months in my area, but does get some use during the winter months. Until last week, it wasn't used for 7 months and was always plugged in.

Even the front page of the instructions for the battery indicates:

** Always RECHARGE the battery promptly after each use **
Allowing a discharged battery to sit for extended periods of time can cause exhaustion.
For maximum performance, leave the battery charging cord plugged in whenever the system is not in use to continuously charge the battery and maintain the full charge.

This is what I follow and it works perfectly fine after almost 3 years now.

That's what I thought but we seem to have diametrically opposed suggestions here.

I too have had my Vagabond II plugged in 24/7, 365 days/year since 2007 with little use in between and have not had any issues so far. But as of last month I decided to plug it in only once a month to top it off. This recomendation came from Tech Support on an earlier post and it really makes a lot of sense anyway. Happy 'location shooting'.

RMS

Maybe support will drop in and see this. There are 2 very different opinions going on here, one from the instruction manual and the other from tech support... Can both be right?

That would definitely help.