Ironically, I had to replace my Car Battery a few weeks ago - came out one morning and it was dead.

For a 2010 Ford Escape Limited -

With a brand new battery, it can sit about 14 days before I would run into a no-start condition. That's with the "truck" sitting in an insulated garage - in the summer.

I helped my son move to FT Worth at the end of July this year. The "truck" hauled a U-Haul trailer through 116F temperatures. It was HOT. It ran like a champ, and no issues but....


It was shortly after this trip is when I noticed that my stand-by time had dropped to 7 days (Battery about 4 years old). I purchased a plug-in Battery Maintainer that would keep the battery topped off without overcharging it. I wasn't driving the "truck" much, and it was sitting for weeks at a time. I did this so I wouldn't come out to a dead battery.

I took the "truck" for a vacation this October up around Michigan. No problems on the trip, but when I got home - after letting is sit for three days, I came out to a battery that had fallen to the point it would no longer start. I hadn't bothered to plug it in to the maintainer, as I was driving it throughout the week.

I think you start rolling the dice with any car battery over three years old, and your risk goes up as you approach the five year mark. Anything past five, and your just darn lucky IMHO.

Maybe I need to find better car batteries, but there's really only a few manufacturers of them these days - Johnson Controls, DEKA and Optima. Optima used to be great until they outsourced the manufacturing to Mexico I've heard.

I've read that it's Heat that actually kills batteries. You don't actually experience the damage until winter comes and the damage comes shows in a drop in CCA's.

I've started wrapping my batteries in Reflectix insulation to try to protect them from heat extremes. Not sure if it will actually make any difference, but it might.

I've never had much luck with the Solar Panels - at least not the little 1.5w 12v-24v ones I've tried to use. I like the small ones as I don't think you need a regulator. If you want something that would actually "charge" a battery, I think you need to get up into the 15w level of panels, and those I think you would want a battery regulator on. I think Battery Tender makes one, but for $100+ price tag, not sure I am that interested going that route.

The new LI-ION battery jumpers that some people have mentioned here I think are probably the best portable solutions right now. The old AGM ones are good, but you HAVE to charge them every 30 days or they will leave you disappointed (and stranded).

Manual Battery Turn Off Switches. Don't do this. Just don't. They don't make good connections, causing battery charging and starting failures when you least expect them. Cutting power to the car is also a great way to reset your car computers engine and transmission "knowledge". You can have some very interesting things happens while your cars computer and transmission "relearns" your driving habits and emission/spark-advance data.