Using a small battery for a GPS tracker

Here’s a few tricks to make it work during RV storage…

Dear readers,

I found this interesting question over on RV Tips, and it’s a good exercise on how to do small battery charging while your RV is in storage.

So I bought this cheap small battery to keep my GPS tracker charged over the winter while stored. All seemed fine for the last month until other day when I get a warning saying the battery on the tracker is at 10%.

Check on the unit today and clearly the battery is toast. Brought it home and it’s got like 1.5V and my charger / conditioner unit won’t even recognize it to charge.

I don’t want to leave one of my dual regular batteries out there. Keeping both charged in parallel all the time for longevity sake.

Do I need to buy a deep cycle battery? Of course I lost the Walmart receipt. 🤦‍♂️💸

Dear Dan,

Be aware that many automatic battery chargers won’t recognize a dead battery. So you have to get the battery voltage up high enough for these “smart” chargers to kick in. Do you have an old Sears 6/2 amp manual battery charger like this one?

That’s what I use to get the voltage up high enough on a dead battery for the computerized automatic charger to recognize it and finish charging. Usually only take 10 minutes or so, but your mileage may vary. So give it a try on your battery, and it might just jumpstart it enough for for smart charger to take over.

How about adding a solar panel?

You’re also going to need a small battery charger running all the time so you don’t discharge the battery down of 0% again. If you’re not close to an electrical outlet then a solar panel is your friend. Here’s what I think would work.

You don’t need a lot of watt-hours per day to provide enough energy for your GPS tracker, so a 10 or 20-watt solar panel with a battery maintenance controller like the one above should do the trick. You can find one on Amazon HERE.

Let’s play safe out there… Mike