Idling to charge dead batteries

I would think you have to drive it.You may have to bring it up to road speed like 30 to 60 mph for roughly half hour of driving in order to keep your batteries properly charged up just as if it was a car..this is something i would do..but thats just me here..it always worked for me though.

 

high idle should do it

 

I can't give you any "professional" numbers.

But I can tell you what I done to take care of this issue.

I fired my truck up for 30 minutes, every 48 hours. If it was extremely hot during that period, I would do it within 36 hours. I allows bumped the idle up to about 800 rpm.

This worked fine for me, even when I took as much as 7 days off.

 

YOU said I 'm trying to satisfy my curiosity here. Some weeks ago, I left my cooler on over the weekend when I was parked and kapuff, my batteries died. Instead of paying for an expensive funeral, I called up the revival specialists and for a mere $30, my batteries came back to life thanks to the holy tow truck. MY 2CENTS If you charged the batteries with your alternator from a jump start then expect to have an early death to your alternator from overheat.

 

Well if you have a total of 1000 amps worth of batteries. You want them to live more than a few months so you can only drain them to 75%, which would be about 9,000 watts that you could use. But you cant, because a battery takes forever to charge to 100%, so you can only use about 5,000 watts of power before you need to recharge.

Your alternator will probably put out a maximum of 600 watts at idle unless you upgrade it. So you would have to idle it for 8 to 10 hours a day.

Of course you could idle it for less and draw more electricity, but what you save in fuel will only cost you in replacement batteries.

 

just 1000 amps? in a Big Truck? hell, I had a 1000 CCA battery in my 1968 F-100.

 

What Jim Bob said....