Battery intelligent automatic charger

Smart battery chargers and subsequent battery trickle chargers are great ways of ensuring your vehicle's battery and electronics are well-conditioned if you leave it for long periods of time. The CTEK MXS 5.0 is simply everything you'd want from a battery charger. It's well-made, fully automatic, and works in all weather conditions.

To maintain the health and charge of your car's battery, you should consider one of the best smart battery chargers available. These are the cream of the crop in the world of car battery care. But they can do other things too. Understandably, you may be wondering what the need or, indeed, the point of a smart battery charger is.

Smart chargers have a multi-stage cycle when charging car batteries. This begins with something called desulphation – restoring battery capacity by removing sulphate from the battery's lead plates. The smart charger will then test the battery to see if it is able to accept a charge.

Smart battery chargers are also programmed with the ability to recondition car batteries. They're a lot more sympathetic and gentle than, say, battery jump starters, which burst a load of volts into your battery at once.

It's no accident that almost all smart chargers now have conditioning modes that can keep a battery topped up long term. These are useful not only for keeping classic cars topped up, but also because modern cars – with their many computer memories and power sapping security systems – drain their batteries in a manner of weeks.

And while a charger's automatic mode won't damage a battery – other than with lithium batteries, which must always use a dedicated cycle – the right mode for the battery type will give a faster charge that may result in a slightly higher charge level, too.