Have you noticed that your vehicle’s battery health is deteriorating? For fleets with seasonal vehicles, some truck and car batteries have been sitting unused for months. Your employees might be finding out the hard way that those vehicles’ batteries are dead, but don’t attribute that to GPS tracker drain, there are a few reasons for it.
What Typically Drains Batteries?
There’s no shortage of causes for battery drain, but some of those involve battery usage, wear, and tear. That’s entirely different from a vehicle parked in good condition that just doesn’t seem to have the amount of power it needs to start a few months later. Chances are, it’s not anything like a bad alternator or faulty battery cables (those should be further down the list of possible culprits).
When vehicles sit, the battery is still powering things like the radio, clock, alarm, and other systems; newer vehicles have even more electronics that require energy, contributing to their depletion. Starting the vehicle and driving recharges the battery, so these electron-hungry systems don’t present a problem.
Vehicles that sit for extended periods, though, don’t get to recharge. Factor in hot weather if the vehicles are sitting all summer (heat will drain battery life, as any Arizona driver will tell you) and you have a recipe for dead batteries.
What’s the Best Way to Prevent Dead Batteries?
There are a few different methods to keep your idle vehicles’ batteries charged and ready.
Battery Drain? It’s Not Just Your GPS Tracker
With more than 50% of fleet vehicles using GPS trackers, it’s easy to see how fleet managers might think of all the potential sources of battery drain. Understandably, they might think the GPS tracker might be at fault.
The fact is, though, that any modern vehicle sitting for a month or more will likely experience battery drain, regardless of whether it’s equipped with a tracking unit. Radios, clocks, alarms, and GPS trackers all pull energy from the battery, ranging from 1 mAh for a clock to as much as 20 mAh hours for a GPS unit in sleep mode (all of these numbers vary by the vehicle type and GPS unit, though).
A GPS tracker may draw more current — but without preventative measures, a vehicle without one will still drain its battery over time.
We recommend deciding which of these solutions – disconnecting the batteries, starting the vehicles regularly, or using trickle chargers – makes the most sense for your fleet.
While situations like COVID-19 are rare, crafting a plan to care for vehicles that sit for a long time unused is a smart plan to ensure that they’re ready to go when you need them. Vehicles like snowplows are a great example: You know they’ll sit in the summer months, so take a few preventative steps to ensure that battery drain doesn’t stop them from being ready to go. Have more in-depth questions about GPS trackers, or looking to track some of your vehicles? Book a demo today and we can show you how we help maintain visibility over your deployed assets and employees.
