[rv7charlie]

Of course, I get about 5 years out of SLAs by ignoring them, never removing them, and rarely using any sort of charger, but whatever floats one's boat is fine with me.
;-)

 

[Kawasakian]

I know people who get a lot of time, way more than I do, out of their batteries. My Spinal Cord injury has curtailed my riding, but when I rode all year, the battery just seemed to last forever. The only thin I did was have a small piece of wood to sit the side stand down on, and that was so it wouldn't dig into the ground and fall over!

I have a battery charger that has a high frequency setting that it goes into to try and take the sulpher out of the plates in the battery and brirng them back. Supposedly, they can bring back a dead SLA, that others would consider gone. I always though with how cheap Gravity Testers are, they could build those into batteries, and just looking at it, you would know where your battery really is at. They have that on all the power tool batteries, and some Duracell regular batteries Heat is what kills batteries, Winter is when you find out how much damage the heat did to your battery.

In the older cars that had separate battery relays, with points, sometimes they would stick together on charge mode and over charge the batteries.. I had a 1964 Volvo 122S blow up the battery when I went to start it, from over charging. When I opened the hood (which now had a bulge in it, the battery had a crack, but you could see how bloated it was. The car was still running though, so I was able to go get the parts and fix it.

 

[WFO-KZ]

... If it were my money, I'd be spending it on a battery first, simply because it's a much smaller pain in the wallet, and I'd figure that I'd probably need one soon, anyway.

Exactly my point! Thank you.

By replacing the battery the OP accomplishes two things:

1) Eliminates a cause or contributor to problem
2) Takes care of an important preventative maintenance item. Nobody likes to be stranded 100 miles from home with a dead battery.