Quote:
Originally Posted by Crashnbrn5
Great info. What is a "short run" Less than 12 miles or less then 4 Miles?
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As we say in the UK "how long is a piece of string?". It all depends on the time of year and how much electrical power you use during the course of a journey. In winter months with the power taken to heat seats, the heated steering wheel and then the heating fan, you might find you are in deficit most the time and the battery never gets topped up to the daily running 80% design level. Eventually running like this you will get problems. Not so much in the summer though.
In my view there is no hard and fast distance that can be determined as a short run, so 12 miles is still too short.
My car has the Canadian specification battery (120 amp/hrs) because it has just about every electrical accessory fitted and accordingly the battery can get run down very quickly. In fact just after I purchased it from a dealer (it was a very low mileage EX BMW manager's car and only 10 months old) it gave me several random errors. I spoke to the dealer and we looked through the storage paperwork and found that the battery had been charged twice in 6 weeks. I discovered it had only been charged for several hours each time and from my experience this was not enough.
Cutting a long story short, I purchased one of the best smart battery chargers money can buy. It is a CTEK MXS 5.0 (different number for USA see note below) and used it over several days and brought the battery up to 100% (not 80% produced by the car's electronics) and since then it has been perfect. This charger is recommended for BMW AGM batteries as fitted to our cars.
In fact I leave it on trickle charge for the 60 days I am away in the Dominican Republic.
Note. CTEK USA site links;
http://smartercharger.com/
The one to purchase is:
http://smartercharger.com/battery-chargers/#CTEK Multi US 4.3
The trickle charger sold by BMW in the UK is made by CTEK with no label on it.
I hope this helps.