disco GS 52 plate battery charging

Hi,
Hope you are all having a "wonderful Christmas time"
Just a quick question.
I like to put my Disco's battery on trickle charge during these damp cold winter days/nights. This was fine on my old 200tdi, no problems. I have just bought a series 2 GS and it states in the handbook that the battery should be disconnected for charging. Can anyone tell me the reason and what might happen if I ignore the written word.
I don't fancy having to reprogram the radio everytime I want to top the battery up.

Regards
RichardG

Get yourself one of these 12v cigarette lighter charger things, when I change my battery I plug that in, thus the alarm/radio can run off the mains.

In fact, last time I did this, I didn't have one of those, so I used an old car battery, croc cliped it into the electrics, while changing the old one. No alarm/raidio issues, fastest disco battery I ever changed.

It could be any 12v battery capable of supplying about 10mA for a night or however long you need to charge for.

Don't worry what the handbook says, its ok to trickle charge while connected, don't fast charge it while connected though.

The reason they say this is,in extreme cases it can damage ECU's, LR are covering their arse by saying don't do it, that way there is no comeback on them should anything go wrong.

I work at a LR dealer and have never disconnected a battery to charge it, never had any problems.

In all honesty though, if the battery is in good nick and you use the vehicle regularly then there should be no need to charge it every night

Once again Clutchdust,
Thanks for the info. I can understand Landrover being on the cautious side when it comes to attaching crude mains devices to sensitive electronics, but I would have thought the battery would remove any mains spikes etc. before they reached anywhere else.
But like you say, if the vehicle is run regularly and the battery is good, then no need to charge.
Thanks also to Discomania,
Good idea, with regards to actually changing the battery.

Regards
RichardG