Is it possible to charge the car battery in CX-5 with an intelligent charger like the C-Tek or is that a big no no? With winter approaching I would like to keep the battery well charged. It was ok to do so in BMW in-spite of the battery management system and auto start stop in the car.

 

Of course you can use a battery charger/tender. There won't be any issues.

 

No issues with your charger.

Only thing I would say, is, if its dead flat, they like a big shot of 10 or 12amps for the first hour to wake them up/clean them up. Otherwise any mid to low charge rate is fine. They do have a long charge time due to their large capacity.

 

Thank you all for your reply. I had read conflicting answers in some other forums about the Mazda battery with stop start system.

 

If the battery is dead flat, the Battery Tender won't charge it, so you would need to use a regular charger to get some life in it, after that they will maintain the charge. I've had great success with a Battery Tender keeping batteries healthy for a long time. I had a Miata that didn't leave the garage in winter and had the original battery for ten years.

 

The NA Miatas were extremely hard on batteries, especially if they were good weather cars. On my old NA, I was replacing batteries almost annually until I got a battery tender which ended my battery purchasing nightmare completely. My NC is much more forgiving, but it still goes on a tender when it gets put away for the winter. I also have a 30 year old lawn tractor which never got more than two years out of a battery until I put a tender on it a few years ago. It's now on year six for this battery. I may have to put a new one in next year, but I'm not sure of that yet.

The tenders, if they are good quality, are worth many times their cost.

 

Our chargers at work are "intelligent" chargers, we can pre-set the Amps & manually wind them up or down during the charging process.

 

ok, I finally got to use my C-Tek charger on the Mazda CX-5 and the whole incident was painless, so it works well.

 

I have a Schumacher charger that does 2, 10 and 50 amp. Can someone explain how to know when to use this to keep my battery stronger for winter and to last longer? I've been a little concerned about this battery since seeing the dealer didn't fill out the paperwork on maintaining the battery while the vehicle was awaiting sale - this could have been just laziness but I've read the battery isn't covered under warranty and if the dealer didn't maintain it properly before sale it will fail early.