Official Battery of Blacktop Magazine
We just picked up the OrangeTop™, a fairly new Hypercore Lithium Cell Battery from Optima along with the durable YellowTop™, RedTop™ and the D400+ Charger/Maintainer.
Our vehicles in the garage have had a pretty good run. In Billy’s “Blacktop Baller”, a 2007 RAM 1500 Big Horn Edition has ran an Optima YellowTop™ for 8 years. At the same time we installed the RedTop™ in ol’ Riff-Raff my 1956 Ford Fairlane. “Down Payment Blues” my ’04 Harley Road King Custom’s battery is also 8 years old. Today we are going to replace them all, starting with this new OrangeTop™ Lithium battery. Lightweight, versatile, super clean and hi-tech, the Quad30 from Optima has a really cool feature called Optima CPR™ that automatically turns the battery off when run down to 30% reserving enough power to restart your vehicle.
Lithium. In one form it is used in treatments for depression and bipolar disease. Kinda like riding a motorcycle. In this form it is a chemical element with a soft, silvery-white alkali metal. It is the least dense metal, and the lease dense solid element. Kinda like some people I know. 🙂
The nucleus of the lithium atom verges on instability, since the two stable lithium isotopes found in nature have among the lowest binding energies per nucleon of all stable nuclides. Because of its relative nuclear instability, lithium is less common in the Solar System than 25 of the first 32 chemical elements even though its nuclei are very light: it is an exception to the trend that heavier nuclei are less common.
And apparently it makes great batteries with substantially less weight.
Because of this unique battery type for vehicles, you cannot jumpstart, charge or maintain it with conventional chargers/maintainers. Fortunately (I like how this works out) Optima also has a line of chargers/maintainers to keep your battery fresh and last longer. We have the D400+ which is a compact unit that can work with all battery types including Lithium batteries. Just plug it into the dongle that is attached to the battery and select the proper setting.
Now time to install the YellowTop in Billy’s truck and the RedTop in the ’56.
Take a look at the entire colorful line at OptimaBatteries.com