planning for battery maintenance

[1carguy]

I am getting ready to break ground on my new toy garage. It will include an air conditioned area 60'x90' where I plan to keep my cars similar to a show room. Currently I have battery tenders going to each car. The space will hold 16 cars comfortably. I defintely do not want wires running everywhere around the cars.

Simplest thing would be to install 16 floor outlets each placed near where I anticipate the cars to be placed. However, 16 floor outlets is going to be pretty expensive. Peerhaps another idea would be to use central battery tender banks and plumb the wires under the slab to where the cars will be placed.

Has anyone had any experience with this? Any advice?

Thanks

 

[mrb]

hm. Can you have floor outlets in a garage?

I take it pendants hanging from the ceiling is out of the question?

 

[BioHazard]

Simplest thing would be to install 16 floor outlets each placed near where I anticipate the cars to be placed. However, 16 floor outlets is going to be pretty expensive.

And 16 cars aren't?

 

[GeorgiaHybrid]

And 16 cars aren't?

Sounds like the man has his priorities right.... Buy more cars with the cash saved...

 

[Friartuck]

Battery Tender has multi-car units available, either four or eight outputs I believe. Suggest strategically locating four units on out of the way walls and use their 12 gauge 12 volt extension cables for the ones furthest away. Suppose you could locate these low on a wall and run on the cables on the floor or mount high on a wall and run cables over the ceiling.

 

[kbs2244]

I would assume you will be parking the cars backed up againt the wall.
To show off the engine.
If you put an outlet behind each car your can run the power cord under the car and have it pretty much out of sight.

 

[CrashTestDummy]

Look at Battery Tenders brand of chargers/tenders.

http://batterytender.com/chargers.html

There are several ways to do this. They have single units that plug directly into the wall outlet. You can use ceiling-mounted outlets and plug two in with the charging wires hanging down to the cars. They have extensions that go up to 25', IIRC, so you can reach a car that's a little out of place. Alternately, they have 2, 8 and 10-car tenders you can get. You can use the same extensions with them. The 8-car unit is even wall-mountable, so you could probably mount it on the ceiling too. I'm currently using a 2-car unit in our shop, and swapping it around from car to car until I can get the 8-car unit ordered. Then, the 2-car unit goes into the house garage, and the one-car unit goes into the tool shed to replace the solar charger we have on the lawn tractor.

Gene Beaird,
Pearland, Texas

 

[trainer]

you could run poly water pipe under the slab to each car from a central charging station

It'd be easy to pull low voltage wiring through. I dont think you would need a very heavy guage of wire for a trickle charger.

At each car the pipe could temninate in some sort of fitting that is flush to the floor and could be capped when not in use.

You would have the flexibility in the future to run power, water, cable tv, air, etc. if you ever decide to use this space for something different

 

[shopnut]

Just a suggestion to anyone with several vehicles needing battery charging during storage:
You really only need to top off each battery for a day or so each month to keep them in good shape (unless you have bad parasitic losses). One charger in a rotation-cycle works fine for many vehicles. To make it even easier switching from one to another, I modified a couple of 30ft spring-rewind power cord reel by replacing the 120VAC ends with 2-pin SAE connectors (to match the output cord on my battery tender) and mounted them on my ceiling. Now its extremely easy to connect up to any vehicle in the garage and there are no cords on the floor. It also helps to standardize the connections to the vehicles, so you're not looking for the correct adapter (all my bikes now have the BMW style receptacle and cars have a 2-pin SAE pigtail).

You may not want to deal with rotating the charge leads all the time, but with driving a number of them on a weekly basis and charging the other ones once and a while, I effectively keep our 15 vehicles charged up and ready to go.

 

[gumbudah]

• *Ceiling drops to each car?
  
  
• *Maybe put in a "fake" gutter style floor drain that you could run low voltage wires through.
  
  
• *Or make a real gutter style floor drain system and use some wet service low voltage wire and run through it. (This'd be my favorite suggestion) although this would probably approach or eclipse the cost of floor outlets.
  
  
• *Wall outlets close to each vehicle then cords on the floor.
  
  
• *Four groups of four cars on one outlet? eight outlets with two cars on each?
  
  
• *Make standard 3/8" expansion joints in the concrete strategically placed to run under each car, then tuck low voltage wire into them?
  
  
• *Floor Cord Protectors?
  
  
• *Put a strong fan in the corner, place a small windmill style generator on each car. I jest but it could work.
  http://cleantechnica.com/author/jerryjamesstone/page/2/http://craziestgadgets.com/2008/09/26/wind-powered-ipod-charger/
  
  
• *Place a solar battery tender on each vehicle and place a light in the ceiling producing appropriate wattage to charge battery (this would be trick and probably the cleanest)
  
  
• *Some sort of inductive charging system (wow, one exists http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/08/charging-nissan-electric-car-wireless-induction.php