optima yellow tip overrated?

That came with my ctek 3300 charger.... a little quick connect plug on one end, and small ring clamps that I added to the positive and negative posts of the battery. the cable reaches up onto the cargo floor, but you can keep it out of view below the floor if you like.
When I am not driving my car that much I can easily connect the charger to the plug.

edit; just read that dolj mentioned the ctek comfort connector further down this thread. Does make things easier.

Also keep in mind, voltage is one part of battery health... you can pick up a decent tester on Amazon like the solar ba5 that is far more reliable when judging the health of any battery than a simple test with a multimeter, or old style load tester. Youtube will be well worth a visit when it comes to getting a better understanding of testing battery condition.

Roland

 

Many "tender" type smart chargers come with an assortment of adapters and one of them is exactly that.
If you are shopping for a charger, you should look for one with the adapters for various connection methods.

 

I think there's no excuse nowadays for every charger not to be a "smart charger." Years ago, the only practical technology in most cases, was to trickle-charge a battery and then put the onus on the user to disconnect it from the charger after a certain recommended time. If the battery failed, you could always blame the user and sell them a new one.

Nowadays, battery-tending technology is cheap and easy to come by. Even the least-expensive piece of equipment should have good battery protection.

 

My Optima "Yellow Top" lasted 7 months. When I replaced it at "Batteries Plus Bulbs" the sales person said that I must have gotten an Optima that had been sitting on the shelf too long.

Q10 ? 2

 

was there no warranty after 7 months?

 

Nope!

 

that's rotten.

 

I'm not an advocate of Optima batteries, but their website indicates a 3 year warranty:
Support - Warranties - on or After 2-1-2009 | OPTIMABATTERIES

 

Problem is - It's Sunday, my wife needs the car tomorrow - I don't have the option to dicker with Optima / Amazon / etc. - Need it today, so got 'er done!

Q10 ? 2

 

The Optima warranty tells you to return the battery to the store/chain you bought it from. Local dealers are not required to provide warranty support for a battery they didn't sell. If a dealer is not available, you can ship it back to Optima at your own expense. They will test the battery and replace it if it is found to be defective. I bought mine online from Advance Auto Parts so I can get warranty support in their stores if I ever need it.

While I am happy with my Optima, it is good to see that there are other sources for a direct-fit battery for the Prius.

 

We have seen more than one report of an OEM Yuasa battery needing to be replaced shortly after a new Prius was put into service.

These cases involved cars that sat on dealer lots for some extended timeframe.

Why the need to spread FUD concerning Optima batteries?

All batteries age, all will suffer from neglect. Optima's included.

When you come time to replace whatever battery you have take care to get one with a recent date of manufacture and ideally bring along a tester to check the voltage. I did that when I tried to buy a battery but it was almost a year old and the low voltage and thick layer of dust confirmed it was sitting on the shelf for too long for my liking. That battery was an Exide, but could have been anybodys brand.

Called Optima up here and asked them prior to placing the order if I would get a new one... they said yes, I bought and they shipped a new one as promised. I would not call Optima over rated, but I would call into question the motives of some that focus on bashing that particular brand. Optima is not the OEM battery in our car.... all the OEM batteries have to be replaced soon or have already been. That doesn't mean that they are over rated. That just means that Yuasa batteries are batteries too.

Roland

 

I agree with all the charging advice, regularly use a CTEK charger on ours. Just a comment:

It's not really necessary to pre-wire a short connector to expedite charger hookup. It's not difficult to clip on a couple of alligator clips every so often...

There's no harm in it either.

 

Why exactly ?

You think that your opinion is valuable but nobody else's is ??
And since when is stating an opinion properly classified as "bashing" ???

I've never used an Optima battery and never will because I think they have been over-hyped in their marketing claims.
Over a LOT of years I have learned that most things which claim to be orders-of-magnitude better than ALL of the competition are probably exaggerating........if not downright lying.

Is that opinion fair to Optima......maybe not but why do YOU care ??

 

His opinion as well as your opinion have equal value if backed up by any order of facts to support that opinion.

I see a lot of unfair bashing of Optima batteries because of problems caused by owner or the selling party's neglect, IE letting a battery self discharge on a store shelf for 6 months to a year without a recharge, causing damaging sulfation. The same for an owner who does not maintain the battery in a normal and necessary state of full, but not overcharge, wrecks it, then blames the battery maker.
I am a long time user of Optima red top starting batteries. Their claims are understated if anything, I have one in a farm tractor used almost daily and still strong after 21 years. I also have many Exide Orbital starting batteries( a spiral cell AGM clone of the Optima) That are in the 15-20 year old range, so in my experience the spiral cell AGM battery is very superior to the conventional flat plate flooded cell, or flat plate AGM design.
They will last a very long time if treated correctly, but are so easy to destroy if mistreated, IE,( overcharged and dried out , allowed to remain only partially charged for months or years and badly sulfated, deep cycled below 50% charge many times), etc.
I also have a little experience with Optima yellow top deep cycle batteries in boats where the owner understood and treated the battery well. Some of those Optima boat batteries are also in excess of 20 years old, so yes, the spiral cell AGM battery is superior technology.

The Prius Hybrid is a strange beast that coddles the 12V battery while being driven( In the right rear, far away from engine heat and vibration, only a 30 amp load for a few seconds to boot up the computers, no heavy high amp cranking loads), is only subjected to a mild float charge when the car is running, yet is very rough on the 12V when parked( All the pumps, sensors , computers, smart key etc, that are powered when the car is parked.) It's up to the owner /driver to make sure the 12V battery is allowed to remain at or near full charge to extend it's useful life, avoid deep cycling the battery by minimum use of 12V accessories while in the accessory mode, and adding a battery charger / maintainer to keep the 12V fully charged when subjected to many short trips which limit recharge time or parked for periods of a week or longer.

 

Conditions of use will affect the life of any battery. For example, I owned a 1975 BMW 2002 which ate up DieHard batteries at two year intervals until I wised up and replaced the voltage regulator. With the replacement in the car, the voltage under charging was about a volt higher than the previous. So the car had been undercharging the batteries and they died. The piece where Sears was at fault was that their techs told me to ignore the low charging voltage claim their own test equipment made against my car saying something like "all the BMW's do that". Well, maybe they all did, but mine was worse.

Point here is that blaming Yellow Top for all premature battery failures is doubtless overkill--sweeping in a host of other problems. We ran the OEM battery for about 4 years in our 2006 Prius. I replaced it with a Yellow Top using the eLearnaid attachments. Still working fine despite an espisode reported here in which I left a door ajar for days and ran the battery down deep into the deep discharge range.

 

Glad to read more informed and helpful comments here.

That is why I started reading and then joined Prius Chat for informed and useful discussion and information.

Then there are those other people. Remind me very much of climate change deniers.

Roland

 

ALL of the comments on here are helpful in one way or another......not just the ones that agree with you.

YOUR experience is just that: one person's experience and it bears no more or less weight than someone else who has had a bad experience.
It is called "anecdotal evidence" and scientifically is close to worthless.

Done. Hard to get around those blinders that are firmly attached.

 

Optima yellow is a deep cycle battery. Car starting is not deep cycle duty. Someone here looked hard in the optima technical documentation and concluded that numerous shallow cycles will be harmful for optima yellow. I checked his conclusions and agreed. You can find it if you search for that thread.

 

Wow, people who don't worship optima are climate deniers. Live and learn. I hope you are just a fanatic, as the other possibility would be even worse.