Schumacher SpeedCharge Battery Maintainer and Charger $12 at Advance Auto Parts

This is an excellent charger for leaving hooked up all winter, slow trickle charging.

This is an excellent charger for the price, but continuously charging a maintenance-free (better known as maintenance-prohibited) battery, even at a trickle, will eventually dry out the electrolyte. It's better than leaving it off a charger, where self-discharge will kill the battery in a single season.

I'd go with a CTEK charger, which can be had for about $40. If your battery costs more than that to replace, it's worth finding a good charger that'll help it last longer. Ctek has a "pulse" mode where, after it's been on trickle for a few days, the charger actually stops charging completely, and wakes up once every few days to apply a few more hours of trickle. I just learned about it the other day, and I'm replacing all my chargers with Cteks as time and funds allow.

^ I've never found that to be much of a factor. What I do is just wait a couple months after the last use (or less if the equipment causes a parasitic drain on the battery to keep settings or clock, etc working), hook up the trickle charger for a month, then it'll have enough charge for spring.

Of course this may or may not be the ideal interval for someone with a longer or shorter period of winter storage than mine - adjust accordingly, I get over 5 years out of SLAs which is about all you can expect unless they're hardly ever used.

What about if you want to have it just to use for the vehicle you drive normally? This one, not the CTEK one.

#4, what's your usage scenario? If you drive the vehicle regularly and have some long-ish trips in your routine, then it doesn't need a charger/maintainer, as the engine-driven alternator should be maintaining the battery's state of charge.

If you make a lot of short trips, seldom running the car for more than 5-10 minutes between starts, then it's possible that the battery might not be receiving a full charge. In this case, a charger/maintainer like this one, connected whenever it's convenient, would be a fine idea.

If you occasionally store the car for long periods (over 2 weeks or so), then either this or a Ctek would be a very good idea. For long-term airport parking, a small solar-panel trickle-charger can be a good idea too, but pair the panel with an actual charge controller to avoid the electrolyte depletion mentioned above.

If you're prone to leaving your lights on and need to jump-start the vehicle in the morning, this is not the right charger. The 1.5-amp output current would take ~10 hours to bring a flat battery up to the point where it could probably crank the engine. For that use case, get something with an engine-starting mode, or at least an output current in the 10-plus amp range. But if that happens often, consider adding an automatic battery cutoff switch like PriorityStart, as leaving the battery flat overnight (or running it flat at all, for that matter) contributes to premature degradation and failure.

I live in a very cold weather environment without a garage. So I am thinking about trickle charging on extreme cold nights. Like -10 degrees or so.

I dont have a block heater yet which is also on the list.

^ Get the block heater and see if that's enough. Your problem is probably that the battery is cold combined with the cold block needing more cranking time so heating the block will raise battery temperature a bit too.

Then again this charger is only $12, might be worth it to have around.

Excellent I had planned to get the block heater already, but now to be sure I will still do both.