If you've ever gone out to the garage to start your motorcycle after a long winter, only to hear a "click, click, click...", then you probably need a Battery Tender Plus. The big advantage of the Battery Tender over normal trickle chargers is the fact that you can plug it in and forget about it. If you leave a normal trickle charger connected to your battery too long, it can actually boil your battery. The Battery Tender is different. When you connect the Battery Tender, it brings your battery to full charge, then automatically switches to a maintenance mode to keep your batter topped off and ready to go - but not overcharged.

One of the other things I like about the Battery Tender is that it comes with a quick-connect harness that can be installed on your battery and tucked out of sight. When you park your motorcycle after a ride, all you have to do is plug the battery into the quick-connect harness, and you're done. That way, you don't have to remove your seat, side covers, etc. The Battery Tender also comes with a second harness with alligator clips, so if you have a battery out of the bike that you want to charge, you can just clamp the alligator clips onto the positive and negative battery terminals. The battery on my 1993 FXSTS is under the seat, so I installed the quick connect harness on that bike, and I use the second alligator clip harness for my Rigid Buell Chopper, since the battery is easily accessible.

One of the only things I don't like about the Battery Tender is that it is slow to charge a battery that is completely dead. If you park your bike for the winter and forget to connect the Battery Tender, and then come out a couple of months later on a nice spring day only to find that your battery is dead, you may need to leave the Battery Tender connected for quite a while in order to get your battery back to full charge.

The other thing I don't like about the Battery Tender is that it doesn't have any kind of meter to give you an indication of how much voltage your battery currently has, and how far it needs to go until it is completely charged. This is easy enough to measure if you have a volt meter or a multimeter, but that requires additional effort! The Battery Tender does have red and green lights that give you some indication of the condition of your battery though (for example, if the green light is flashing, the battery is at least 80% charged, if the green light is steady, the battery is 100% charged, etc.).

In summary, I would highly recommend the Battery Tender to anyone who doesn't already have one. I've had mine for over 5 years, and used it on several different bikes, and it's still going strong. At $50 or $60, it's about half the price of a new battery, and it definitely more than pays for itself when your batteries start lasting much longer than they did without it.