Many newer vehicles will kill a battery when parked and not started after just 30 days. So yes, if a vehicle is not driven constantly, it needs the battery unhooked or a maintainer. Not so much of an issue if the auto is old enough to NOT have constant draws like an alarm, ECM memories, etc. Even my 1998 Dodge Grand Caravan will kill a full charge battery in one month. It even gives the warning in the owner's manual.
Unhooking a battery can be kind of a pain in some areas when it causes errors in the emissions controls system. Maintainer makes things easier. Well - except when I had not driven a car in two months and then drove off with the battery-maintainer still plugged in.
Many new cars and trucks leave the factory with a built-in 100 milliamp draw on the battery, all the time. A typical car battery is around 60-70 amp-hours. The math to calculate is not pure linear, but . . 1 amp for 70 hours is dead in 3 days. So at 100 milliamps - just a guess with simple math - it takes 30 days.
Old tractors should not have any built-in draw. Regardless, batteries all have a self-discharge rate and that rate gets higher as batteries age.
I have a maintainer on the battery in my 1985 diesel Isuzu truck. Battery is 14 years old. When it was new - it could sit for a year and still start right up. Now? If I take the maintainer off, it goes dead in one day. Seems good batteries die very slow deaths and just self-discharge beyond a tolerable point. Since my Isuzu is just a "yard buggy" that rarely gets used - I am fine with the battery until it goes dead in less then a day.
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Today's Featured Article - Old Time Threshing - by Anthony West. A lovely harvest evening late September 1947, I was a school boy, like all school boys I loved harvest time. The golden corn ripens well and early, the stoking, stacking,.... the drawing in with the tractors and trailers and a few buck rakes thrown in, and possibly a heavy horse. It would be a great day for the collies and the terrier dogs, rats and mice would be at the bottom of the stacks so the dogs, would have a busy time hunting and killing, all the corn was gathered and ricked in what we c
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