For anywhere north of Cowtown, your best bet is a battery blanket - even if you dont plug in, they keep the battery insulated and ready to crank.

Enjoy the rest of the winter, up here it's the mildest in living memory!

 

/\ He's far enough north to know about the cold.

 

 

Not quite that far north. But, I think you can see his house from there.

 

Or, maybe you wouldn't have had to play around with a baggie of concentrated sulfuric acid in the middle of the night. But, who knows?

It all works, really. Lead-acid batteries have been around longer than cars. So they usually work as expected. As I tried to say, any reputable manufacturer's battery is going to give reasonable service if you treat it right.

There have been *some* advances since the Civil War, and now you can avail yourself of a maintenance-free battery, or even one that can't leak. Those address 2 of the more common lead-acid battery headaches. Deep-cycle can be useful also. These aren't life-altering choices as someone pointed out. But they are beneficial.

The cost/benefit decision is up to the owner. I've certainly been on the "only enough money for what works" side of the equation. But of course back then I wasn't driving anything like an RX-8, or even 1/10 of one! In fact that's what adds to my surprise when someone with a $30K+ car becomes adamant about expense of a consumable. Nothing wrong with frugality, but since I could afford an RX-8 I sure as heck can afford a battery that I don't have to think about for a few years.

But to each his own.

 

I view it as having gotten to play with a bag of acid in the middle of the night.

As well as the "dealer" being a mile and a half from my house, rather than ten miles away at the mall. The drug store has changed hands and no longer does batteries, but there's now an Advance Auto in the same strip mall.

The thing is that it IS a consumable. I tend to keep cars a long time, long enough that I've lost track of how many replacement batteries I've gotten. I've had no-name batteries last 5 or 6 years, and name brand ones fail in two or three.

I suspect that I'll go for Advance's maintenance free battery when Zoomy's original passes on to the great acid bath in the sky.

And some day I may own a $30K+ car and consider an expensive designer battery.

Ken