I use a Battery Tender. I don’t use it all the time because the drain/discharge is very slow for this type of battery. I charge it when the on-board voltmeter drops from 12.8V to (say) 12.7V or 12.6V.
In the Owners Manual that comes with the battery, here’s what the manufacturer (Hawker) says about chargers:
“To get long life from the Odyssey battery it is important that the battery be kept near full charge. Low power 1.25 amp Battery Tenders will keep a fully charged battery fully charged, but cannot recharge if Odyssey becomes discharged.
Special chargers such as the Deltran 12V 6 amp or 12V 20 amp designed for Odyssey are required for routine deep discharge applications (such as total loss racing applications where you don’t charge during a race). If a standard automotive charger is used to boost charge a discharged battery (11.5V) because of an accessory left on, it is important to make sure that the charging voltage does not exceed 15V during charge.”
(For a PC 680 this means no faster than a two hour charge time at 10 amps.)
BTW, the Odyssey carries a two year full free replacement warranty when used in a motorcycle.
http://batterytender.com/notice_odys...43f5 f600533f Notice to Odyssey Battery Users
Deltran Battery Tender no longer endorses nor recommends the Hawker Energy Products Odyssey line of batteries for PowerSports vehicles. In our opinion, Hawker's advertising program for the Odyssey battery does not promote the best interest of the PowerSports industry or consuming public.
The marketing department at Hawker uses the term "PCA" to rate their battery cold cranking capacity. The term "Pulse Cranking Ampere" is not a BCI (Battery Council International) industry standard and in our opinion should not be used to measure battery output.
The battery industry has, and still uses, a very specific set of criteria to test batteries ("CCA"). The term "PCA" can be, and is, very misleading to the consumer because it is inconsistent with industry standards.
Deltran is a forty year old family-owned business that prides itself on not only customer satisfaction, but most importantly, product safety. In our opinion the chargers specifications recommended by Hawker could be very dangerous to the average consumer if those chargers were inadvertently used on normal flooded or gel batteries.
Deltran also believes that most of the today's PowerSports vehicles are supplied with standard alternators that have an output of approximately 14.2 volts. Hawker Odyssey batteries require a voltage over 14.7 volts to fully recharge the battery. The standard alternator will not return a Hawker Odyssey battery to a full state of charge.
We feel that the Hawker Odyssey battery was developed for the Stand-by Power industry and not for Powersports vehicles. COMMENT: This sounds like a finger-pointing battery failure dispute between Hawker and Deltran, but I can address the two issues mentioned.
First, my Odyssey Owners Manual states that the battery is rated at 280 "CCA", not "PCA" as Deltran claims, so I haven't been misled.
Second, according to my on-board digital voltmeter, my 916 charging system that outputs around 13.6V will bring an Odyssey to the fully-charged voltage level of 12.8 volts that Hawker specifies, so Deltran's statement that a voltage output greater than 14.7 volts is needed for a full recharge is not correct - at least for a partially discharged PC680 battery. Perhaps this is an issue only for an Odyssey that has seen a deep discharge.
[Edited on 3-22-2006 by Shazaam!]