In 2022 I decided to get my mechanical ducks in a row. I’m half-assing my way in that general direction. My machines and gear are/were a bit of menagerie. Most stuff is well used (over used?) and my budget is low so it’s slow going. Plus life is chaos.
Anyway I did some stuff in 2022 and more in spring 2023… then the world temporarily ended. Shit happens. And machines degrade while you’re otherwise occupied.
If you’re not dead you haven’t been defeated so I started moving forward again. To my great delight and relief I managed to start two long ignored machines (plus handled a routine happenstance).
The zeroth challenge was that Mrs. Curmudgeon’s car wouldn’t start. Her car really is a daily driver so that sucks! But it was darned cold out and the battery is long in the tooth. These things happen. It was -20 Fahrenheit (or maybe a little less). The little car just couldn’t fire up.
I keep a Noco Boost Sport GB20 battery pack with my dirt bike. I never leave home without it. I wandered into my stone cold garage and grabbed the device from where I’d strapped it to my bike. It started her car like a boss! I can’t overstate how impressed I am with these things! (I also use mine for camping. It can charge phones and my SpotX and an iPad or my shortwave radio. Also it’s a flashlight. Really nice piece of kit!)
I don’t use it on cars much. I was so impressed how easily it started a car that I went out and ordered a second Noco Boost GB20. This way I could put mine back with my bike and gift a new one to Mrs. Curmudgeon. I was prepared to buy a bigger unit for use with the car but Noco recommended the diminutive GB20 for “normal sized” cars (it won’t start my diesel truck I’m sure).
The story gets better. It came via Amazon a few days after I ordered it. I handed it to her but Mrs. Curmudgeon didn’t open the box. The very next day it dipped down below -20 again. As before her car was bricked. (I sense a new battery purchase in the near future.) Mrs. Curmudgeon was convinced you need a Y chromosome to operate anything involving a car battery. I assured her that unlike most of my gear, this one was easy to operate. I mean it. It’s stupid easy to operate and has a thousand safeguards. Heck, it’s almost cuddly! She clipped the thing to her car’s terminals and jump started her car with absolutely no drama. Those little battery packs are miraculous!
So now we have two, mine lives on my motorcycle and the other is in a regular car.
The first challenge was my old ATV. It was serviced in 2022 but time flies when you’re in the shit. It sat all winter from fall 2022 on. In spring 2023 I shamelessly raided it for the battery. No regrets, I needed the battery and I was broke. The poor thing sat unused (with the seat removed and everything) until this weekend. The battery had been taken off its temporary duty and had been sitting on a maintainer for at least 6 months. I rolled the ATV into a warm-ish place where it was 40 degrees instead of -20 and gave it a week to warm up.
I installed the battery and buttoned it up. I had no optimism it would start.
But it did! In a fit of joy, I tore off on a dirt road to “warm it up”. I wasn’t well dressed for a winter ATV excursion and promptly froze. I only went 4-5 miles. But that was enough to get everything up to operating temp. It’s running pretty darned well actually!
Back in the past, I’d parked it plum full of gas and that was the hint I’d shown some foresight. The gas hadn’t gone bad! I can only assume past Curmudgeon had the minimal intelligence to top it off with Stabil and non-oxygenated fuel. Nor were the carbs mucked up. Probably I’d run the carbs dry during “decommissioning”.
Damn it’s nice when past me doesn’t fuck over present me!
The second challenge was my old truck (sometimes I call it “Jeep-thing”). It’s an old 4×4 beast that I haven’t seen fit to unveil on my blog. It is a bad ass off road machine but it’s still in recovery after long neglect. One serious limit is that it doesn’t have heat. I don’t mean the canvas top and the ungasketed windows are drafty, I mean it’s utterly 100% unheated. The components that once did that are long gone. There is no insulation anywhere and no heat at all. In winter it’s like riding in a vibrating refrigerated steel box.
Patience old truck, your time will come again.
Anyway, it hasn’t been started since the beast playfully forced me to spend a weekend driving around in the dirt… back in October. (The story is here: My Truck Takes Me For A Walk, Parts 1, 2, 3.)
Without a battery maintainer, I feared the dual batteries were toast. But, and this was the second miracle of the weekend, it started!
I took it for a 20 mile jaunt. It ran like a top. I returned half frozen but grinning.
Enjoy every little bit of good luck. Then build on it.
I’m slowly improving my “fleet” of battery maintainers. You may think this is lame but it’s a major achievement to me. My personal battle against entropy starts with keeping batteries charged.
This will be the year I have maintainers on all of my motorcycles! I didn’t have one for my ATV but I will soon! In my garage I had a NOCO GC002 X-Connect M6 Eyelet Terminal Accessory. I bought it in 2022 and never got it installed. It’s a miracle I hadn’t lost it! (ATVs and motorcycles and lawnmowers have pipsqueak batteries. They need a smaller pigtail than things with “regular sized” batteries. All of the Noco stuff I’ve bought comes with the bigger pigtail. I have several stashed in my toolbox.)
Even though I had the pigtails I didn’t have another maintainer. I ordered a NOCO Genius 1. It’s a tiny spud of a maintainer but it’s plenty for a motorcycle or ATV. I haven’t tried the tiny Genius 1 on a car, it seems a little too small for that. (I have used Genius 10 on cars, and that works fine. I did have a Genius 10 malfunction after it got froze into a snowdrift and flooded in snowmelt many consecutive times. I don’t blame that on the device, the user (me) beat the shit out of it. ) A NOCO Genius 1 looks like this:
I put a NOCO Genius 1 on all my toys that sit unused all winter. When the ATV maintainer arrives I’ll have assembled a “fleet” of 3 NOCO Genius 1 devices and one battery tender. (The battery tender pigtails came pre-installed in the 1989 Pacific Coast 800 I bought in 2023. I didn’t feel like swapping to different pigtails so I just bought the right maintainer to go with the pigtails. It’s kind of a shame because it would look super cool to have 4 identical maintainers all lined up.)
But wait there’s more! I was on so much of a roll that I changed the oil in my tractor and generally gave it a minor service. The tractor has a block heater but had no maintainer. It’s a Kioti tractor and it is a bit cold blooded. I decided to go nuts and buy a maintainer for the tractor too. That’s a bigger battery and I use the tractor in the coldest weather. So I bought a Noco Genius 10:
It’s a little bigger than the tiny GB20 but a tractor needs a lot more grunt than a motorcycle or basic car.
I also learned to open the hood of my tractor when I park it. The tractor gets hot and melted snow runs down the hood. When you shut down that ice freezes the hood shut like it’s welded! Took me a few years to learn that! (I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out on day one but maybe I’m dumb.)
Between the block heater and the battery maintainer the tractor starts like a champ. On the other hand I replaced the tractor battery last summer, so it hasn’t been tested over time with an older battery.
So long as I’m on the topic, my Dodge has twin 12v batteries in parallel and I have an on board maintainer installed in the truck. I use it anytime it’s not particularly warm. I think it makes the batteries last longer too. I can’t remember the brand I installed, it wasn’t a Noco though.
Now I’m shopping for one last maintainer. My 4×4 truck has two 12v batteries in series making 24 volts total. I have no idea who sells a maintainer for a setup like that. If you know of one, shoot me a comment. Thanks.
My story of Project Daily Driver (2022) is here:
- Project Daily Driver / Gift From Past Me
- Project Daily Driver: Coming Apart At The Seams
- Project Daily Driver: Who Are You Calling An Antique?!?
- Project Daily Driver: Strange Observations In The Hinterlands
- Project Daily Driver: Pre-Paid Emergency Room
Note: I get tiny kickbacks if you buy from any link on my blog that goes to Amazon. It costs you nothing. But that’s not why I linked all that stuff. I really am impressed with Noco gadgets and I’m super stoked whenever winter doesn’t kill expensive batteries. I have good luck with Noco and battery maintainers in general are a good way to make my life easier.
One last note, “jump start” and “maintain” are two different things:
A “boost” or “battery pack” will jump start a dead car. That’s all it does. (OK fine I use mine for charging USB gadgets and as a flashlight, but it can’t “charge” a car battery.) The “boost” carries within it a battery with the energy to do jump start engines. It works wherever you are and you’ll feel smug and superior when you don’t have to beg someone to help you with jumper cables.
A “maintainer” won’t do jack shit if you’re off grid. It’s not for wilderness use. It’s plugged in at your house. It uses “shore power” (the AC power grid) to keep you car’s battery thawed and topped off. It’s not meant to jump start a dead anything. However, any functional battery on a maintainer will be more or less at peak performance for its age. It also takes a lot of stress off winter stretched batteries, I think they last longer if carefully “maintained”.