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Originally Posted by mrlmd1
A battery tender is not the same as a charger.
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You should stick to medicine, Doc. :poke2: :biggrin:
A battery tender is just a specialized charger. It works absolutely fine as a "plain" charger, as long as you don't expect too much from it. If the battery capacity is 10 amp-hours, you can charge it at a 1 amp rate for 10 hours OR at a .5 amp rate for 20 hours and the end result would be roughly the same. Going to either extreme, however, introduces some problems; you can't charge it at .1 amps nor at 50 amps, for instance.
And a plain charger works fine as a tender too.....in a manual mode; you just have to remember to connect it for a few hours every week or month.
And finally, a "plain" charger automatically tapers off to a smaller charge current just because that's the way electricity works. As the battery voltage goes up, it opposes the charging current more and it charges less. A 2 amp plain charger will NOT damage a battery if it is left on it just for a few days; it takes weeks or months........unless the battery involved is extremely small, much smaller than a bike battery. You can also get away with using a really small trickle charger (.5 amp or less) as a tender BECAUSE of that taper effect; by the time the battery is fully charged, the current is down to .1 amp or less which does no damage, long term.
The advantage of a "real" tender, then IS that it will do the initial charge fairly quickly AND then will switch to "float" mode for long term maintenance. If you are trying to charge a battery that is SO dead that a tender won't do the job, you might as well give up and get a new battery because a bigger charger will only revive it once or twice......if at all.
NOW, if you have a WHOPPING big charger, that is rated at 10 amps or more, it can damage a small battery quicker but a couple of days would only result in a little lost water.