Battery charging location

[SkyBound]

The time is coming to pull the trailer batteries off the frame and put them on a trickle charger for the winter. I'll be using a Battery Tender for my two Trojan 6V and charging them connected in series as one battery.

My question to you is - where do you guys charge the batteries over the winter? Garage? Basement? I like the idea of the basement because it's warmer than garage, but I recognize the hydrogen gas emissions and wonder if it's safe to charge them inside the house long term.

[octane]

I always charged my boat dual purpose battery in the basement, on a wood shelf. I don't think that the trickle charger creates a lot of hydrogen since it's such low amps.

[RoyBraddy]

My battery banks were installed in early 2009. These are the 12VDC Standard issue Interstate batteries that usually come with the new trailer purchases... I originlly had four each in Parallel but lost one right away before I purchased a Smart Mode Converter/charger unit on my OFF-ROAD POPUP trailer that would easily go into Smart Mode charging mode when needed to do so. The remaining three 12VDC Batteries have been running well for me ever since (255AH capacity)..

Just a couple of notes we have learned over the years...
-A fully charged battery really doesn't need to be continuously charged if you have it completely disconnected.

-A fully charged battery will not freeze up internally either with temps down to the mid 20s over night...

-A small trickle charge should not make a battery setup out gas of battery fumes...

Most often my batteries stay in their battery boxes on my OFF-ROAD POPUP trailer and the trailer is always connected to shore power plugged into the garage 20AMP Service receptacle when sitting here at the house. The ON-BOARD Smart Mode Converter/Charger will keep the batteries in great shape during the winter months. I will check the battery status every two to three weeks out of habit...

Last season I left my batteries sitting in their battery box completely switched OFF CIRCUIT over the winter months and did not power up the OFF-ROAD Trailer from the garage. I did check their DC VOLTAGE every couple of weeks just out of habit and if they continually read 12.5-6 VDC I left them alone..

I did at times just run a trickle charge across the battery switch for a couple of hours...

I did completely remove my batteries for a short time but this was for security measures only. We also had a couple of county wide power outages here and I was using my batteries to parallel my 1500WATT House UPS setup for my Emergency Radio operations and did my 50% to 90% re-charge of the batteries during this time period while they were sitting in the garage on the work bench area...

When using my batteries during the power outage I used my 2KW Generator to power up my B&D VEC1093DBD 40A Smart Mode Battery charger to recharge the battery bank in around three hours of generator run time each day during this time period.

My batteries are still sitting on my garage work bench area as we did not go camping anywhere this season... Just measured them then a couple of weeks ago and they are still reading 12.5-6 VDC across the open battery terminals... I will run a small trickle charge on them every month or so for a few hours...

Roy Ken