Can a GPS Tracker Drain your Car Battery?
If you have a GPS tracker in your vehicle, have you noticed that your vehicle’s battery is diminishing? For seasonal fleets, some vehicles may be sitting unused for months. When it’s time to start the vehicle, your staff might find that those vehicles’ batteries are dead. It’s easy to see how fleet managers might attribute battery drain entirely to a GPS tracker. While it’s possible, it’s usually not the main culprit.
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What Typically Drains Batteries?
- When vehicles sit, the battery is still powering things like the clock, alarm, radio, internal electronics systems, possibly some lights/LEDs, and third party systems, including a GPS tracker. The newer the vehicle, the more electronics there are that require power, all of which contribute to battery depletion.
- The age of the vehicle battery is the primary factor in determining how quickly a vehicle battery will drain from all these power demands. Factor in hot weather if the vehicles are sitting all summer, or cold weather if sitting over a winter, and the potential for dead batteries increases significantly.
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What About a GPS Tracker?
- A GPS tracker does draw battery power, even in sleep mode. Btracking GPS trackers typically wake to send location reports every 6 hours when a vehicle is parked.
- Each time it reports location, the battery usage is roughly the equivalent of turning on an interior LED light for about a minute.
- In relation to all the other embedded electronics, the power drain from a GPS tracker is minimal.
- Add up all the power drains, however, and it’s entirely possible that a vehicle with a battery in new condition might be experiencing significant power loss, even enough to prevent it from starting, after being parked for as little as a month or 6 weeks.
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What’s the Best Way to Prevent Dead Batteries When Vehicles are Parked Long Term?
- Remove or shut down electronics systems. If you don’t need GPS locations sent when the vehicle is parked long term, consider removing the tracker. Alternatively, consider requesting the tracker send locations less frequently when parked, such as once a day or once a week.
- If you have a 3rd party system, such as an alarm system, but the vehicle is stored safely and you don’t need it, unplug it or turn it off.
- Disconnect the batteries. This is a sure way to prevent electrical systems from guzzling battery power. There’s a downside, though: You’ll have to reset the clocks and radios. It could also be a time-consuming operation.
- Battery disconnect switches are also an option, which could be added during a vehicle’s next scheduled maintenance.
- Start and run the engines weekly. Simply starting vehicles, even for a few minutes every week or two, is better than leaving the vehicles sit. Driving vehicles does a far better job restoring batteries’ state of charge in a very short period of time.
- Use a trickle charger. Beware, however, that some trickle chargers don’t turn off automatically, which means you could wind up overcharging the batteries. You’d also need to find outlets to plug them all in. Solar trickle chargers are available, if your vehicles are parked in an open area that gets 6 hours or so of sunlight every day.
- Set up a ‘Low Battery Voltage Alert’. More than 50% of fleets are already using a solution that might help: their GPS tracking devices. Btracking can send alerts when battery voltage drops below a critical level. For example, you might want an email, or text, or a popup on your phone app that alerts you when a vehicle’s battery drops below 11.3 volts for 30 minutes or more. At Btracking we can configure alerts to warn you, any way you need them.
It’s important to plan to care for vehicles that sit for a long time unused so all your vehicles are ready to go when you need them. Vehicles like snowplows are a great example: You know they’ll sit in the summer months, so take a few preventative steps to ensure that battery drain doesn’t stop them from being ready to go.
Have more in-depth questions about GPS trackers, or looking to track some of your vehicles? Book a demo or contact us today and we can show you how we help maintain visibility over your deployed assets and employees.