Battery died while garaged

wstar

Pretty much any trickle charger should be enough to offset the drain while stored. You can always check on it once a week or so and see how it's doing. Just pull off the trickle charger, wait a few minutes for surface charge to dissipate, and then check the battery voltage with a voltmeter.

Another option for winter storage is to just disconnect the negative battery cable completely while stored. You may *still* need a trickle charger or an occasional hit with a real charger (because lead-acid batteries lose charge slowly on their own, but AGM or Gell-Cell do it much slower), but you definitely won't have drain. Only real downside is it resets the ECU, so you have to deal with that (mostly: you have to reset the window motor controls by running them down then back up + hold for several seconds, and take it easy for the first few miles while it re-learns fuel trims).

Jump-starting the car is just as fine on a 370Z as it is on any other car. ECUs have been around a long time and they're in pretty much every vehicle on the road these days. As long as you don't do something stupid that's as likely to cause a fire or electrocute you as hurt the car, nothing will go wrong. I jump-start mine constantly in the cold now (with one of those portable jump-start battery pack things) because its tiny little lithium battery never starts well on a winter-cold morning at the track.

While I'm pontificating: change the oil ASAP. Oil that's been sitting there for a season sucking up moisture and becoming acidic is no good for the car.

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