Caveat: The following is information only. Caveat Emptor. These products are not Porsche official products and your use is on you. What has worked for me, and the risks I take, might not work for you. The following is, in good faith, correct to my knowledge. If anything is wrong, say so and lets correct it. I’ve used a CTEK faithfully for almost 12 years, using it hundreds of times. They work. Most of this comes from experience, some gathered from info within the forum and there's too many people to credit or find who said what, from their trial and error, so I'd attribute it to the entire forum.
There are many threads on charging the battery or general battery information. Here are some:
New Battery what battery maintainer to buy
Replacing the Battery
Battery tender takes Forever
Are 12V outlets on late '15's coded to accept trickle chargers?
I’m going to try to give step-by-step directions on how to charge a Macan with a CTEK smart charger. CTEKs seem to be the de facto, go to smart charger for Porsches, for maybe a decade. AFAIK, Porsche chargers are rebranded CTEKs. This does not mean you can’t use anything else, but rather its what I know. YMMV. Try anything at your own risk. Feel free to add how to use any other charger to the thread. Here is the North American website for CTEK.
If you care about warranty, there are authorized dealers and CTEK specifically warns you against using unauthorized dealers. There are many versions of the CTEK but for general purposes, lets focus solely on what should work. Ignore the .8, 3.3, and 25 Amp versions and focus on the 4.3 and 7 Amp versions. There is also a 4.3 Amp polar version good to -22F. Otherwise, they are good to -4F. The versions have evolved to now the user interface shows 8 lights or there is the CT5 version that gives the number of hours left to finish charging. The 3300 does not have the capacity to charge the 92AH Macan Battery topping at 90 AH. The 4.3 Amp versions are good to 110 AH and the 7 amp version much higher. The 7 Amp will also provide constant power to the car while the others 4.3 will not. These are not Jump Packs. If you need a jump pack, then there are many small lithium versions or larger AGM battery jump packs like the Clore Jump N Carry. These units should not overcharge a battery. This isn't your grandpa's trickle charger. For a good overview of what is going on watch:
Like many others, I discovered the hard way that if you don’t drive modern Porsches every day, the battery dies. It’s as simple as this. I know I was pretty upset. My sports car was two years old and stranded with a dead battery. I had to call AAA for a jump and visit the dealer for a new battery. That was so much fun.
Porsche warns you to use a battery maintainer under certain circumstances. For example, from the New Car Limited Warranty & Customer Information Model Year 2019
Determine whatever size meets your needs. I settled on the 4.3 because at the time I bought it, the 3300 did not have the 8 lights and the 7 Amp seemed like overkill. There are many accessories for CTEKs. You can see them all on their website.
I've found the 8’ extension valuable.
I find the rubber bumper a must have. Who wants to accidentally bang a metal box against the body work? CTEK Bumper 56-915
This is the cigarette lighter adapter
Eyelets. Caution, there are different sizes
The units might be splashproof but I doubt they are waterproof. If you use this outside, I would be wary of rain, ice, sleet, snow, or any precipitation.
How to connect the unit:
In the sports cars, the eyelet connectors can be directly connected to the battery permanently. The eyelet connector cap has an o-ring sealed from weather. It can be snaked through the windshield wipers opening, put a baggie on top for extra protection and then the car charged without opening anything. Unfortunately, the Macan battery is in the worst possible place I can image for ease of access, buried under the hatch floor, under the spare. Who is going to try to get to that in a snowstorm to jump the car? Watch around 2:30. There is no easy way to put the eyelets on because the connector does not unscrew.
@JoeInBucks mentions making some other kind of U connector but anything made is a jury rig. This was not designed to add anything onto it. Then there is the problem of how to run the cord out. The eyelet accesory probably isn’t long enough so you’d need to use the extension cord and where does it lie? Many people use a SUV as a SUV and throw all kinds of stuff in the hatch, probably not paying attention to where things land. I’d end up damaging the cord. I consider this a non-starter. This brings us to the connections under the hood for jump starting.
You can connect to the terminals under the hood, with the alligator clips and it does work. In order to close the hood, the clip has to lie nearly flat.
![Image]()
The positive terminal is a tight fit to the bolt
![Image]()
I’ve seen Macans in dealerships charging this way. But, that’s in a showroom with the hood up. The upside to this method is that if the power goes out, then the CTEK should restart from the beginning, quickly going through the 8 steps to the point it left off. However, if it were in pulse mode, I’d expect it would wait 10 days before going back to pulse mode.
There are two downsides. First, constantly opening and closing the hood is an aggravation. The hood release feels like a cheap piece of plastic that could break one day. The hood is huge and you need to get the clips to lay flat if closing the hood. Second, the moment you open the hood, then close it, you cannot get an oil level reading until you drive maybe 10 miles or so. YMMV. The downsides to this seem to outweigh the positive. Unless fear of a power outage is real, I do not see this as a reasonable solution with the alligator clips.
The last way to charge is via the cigarette lighter adapter. I don't know if the other outlets will work. Somewhere back around 2015, somebody mentioned that you could get the dealer to "code" the lighter to remain hot. I haven't seen this can happen recently. So this is under the assumption it shuts down after some short period of time.
Before going into the steps, there is one huge downside to all of this, and that's the user interface. It seems thats its mired in the mid-2000s while the world has moved on to "there's an app for that". By this I mean that I can sit somewhere else, BBQ some steaks, and know exactly the temperature of the pit and the internal temp of the steaks, remotely by looking at a tiny device or an app on a phone. I can turn lights on/off in the house from anywhere in the world. Yet, in order to see the status of these devices, one has to physically go to them and look at some lights. First world problems to be sure but IMO 10 year old technology. IMO, there should be an app for that, to include remote turning the unit on and off, as well as to know, reasonably close, the number of minutes left to finish charging. In 2008 this felt like magic, bringing a dead battery back to life. Today, the user interface, IMO, feels old. That's not criticism of the charging technology but my opinion that society has got me used to just looking at a phone, and getting an immediate answer.
Continued in the next post.
There are many threads on charging the battery or general battery information. Here are some:
New Battery what battery maintainer to buy
Replacing the Battery
Battery tender takes Forever
Are 12V outlets on late '15's coded to accept trickle chargers?
I’m going to try to give step-by-step directions on how to charge a Macan with a CTEK smart charger. CTEKs seem to be the de facto, go to smart charger for Porsches, for maybe a decade. AFAIK, Porsche chargers are rebranded CTEKs. This does not mean you can’t use anything else, but rather its what I know. YMMV. Try anything at your own risk. Feel free to add how to use any other charger to the thread. Here is the North American website for CTEK.
If you care about warranty, there are authorized dealers and CTEK specifically warns you against using unauthorized dealers. There are many versions of the CTEK but for general purposes, lets focus solely on what should work. Ignore the .8, 3.3, and 25 Amp versions and focus on the 4.3 and 7 Amp versions. There is also a 4.3 Amp polar version good to -22F. Otherwise, they are good to -4F. The versions have evolved to now the user interface shows 8 lights or there is the CT5 version that gives the number of hours left to finish charging. The 3300 does not have the capacity to charge the 92AH Macan Battery topping at 90 AH. The 4.3 Amp versions are good to 110 AH and the 7 amp version much higher. The 7 Amp will also provide constant power to the car while the others 4.3 will not. These are not Jump Packs. If you need a jump pack, then there are many small lithium versions or larger AGM battery jump packs like the Clore Jump N Carry. These units should not overcharge a battery. This isn't your grandpa's trickle charger. For a good overview of what is going on watch:
Like many others, I discovered the hard way that if you don’t drive modern Porsches every day, the battery dies. It’s as simple as this. I know I was pretty upset. My sports car was two years old and stranded with a dead battery. I had to call AAA for a jump and visit the dealer for a new battery. That was so much fun.
Porsche warns you to use a battery maintainer under certain circumstances. For example, from the New Car Limited Warranty & Customer Information Model Year 2019“must be used”. It goes on to talk about 6,000 miles per rolling year. That’s about 16 miles/day. And so I learned that whatever I knew about other cars, no longer applied and no amount of being upset about it would matter. If a Porsche isn’t driven in a week, I plug it in to top off the battery. In the winter with colder temperatures outside, I might do it more often. I have used the 4.3 on the old style battery and the AGM. I do not think you are supposed to use the recondition mode on AGM. I have used it on the non-AGM battery and it worked. The 5 Amp version does have a recondition mode for AGM. I only use the snowflake mode on the AGM batteries. I’ve also used the tiny battery option on the 4.3 to charge a small motorcycle size battery used in a generator. It worked fine and it wasn’t on snowflake mode. In the following, Jay is holding up a 4.3. If its good enough for Jay, its good enough for me.
Determine whatever size meets your needs. I settled on the 4.3 because at the time I bought it, the 3300 did not have the 8 lights and the 7 Amp seemed like overkill. There are many accessories for CTEKs. You can see them all on their website.
I've found the 8’ extension valuable.
I find the rubber bumper a must have. Who wants to accidentally bang a metal box against the body work? CTEK Bumper 56-915
This is the cigarette lighter adapter
Eyelets. Caution, there are different sizes
The units might be splashproof but I doubt they are waterproof. If you use this outside, I would be wary of rain, ice, sleet, snow, or any precipitation.
How to connect the unit:
In the sports cars, the eyelet connectors can be directly connected to the battery permanently. The eyelet connector cap has an o-ring sealed from weather. It can be snaked through the windshield wipers opening, put a baggie on top for extra protection and then the car charged without opening anything. Unfortunately, the Macan battery is in the worst possible place I can image for ease of access, buried under the hatch floor, under the spare. Who is going to try to get to that in a snowstorm to jump the car? Watch around 2:30. There is no easy way to put the eyelets on because the connector does not unscrew.
@JoeInBucks mentions making some other kind of U connector but anything made is a jury rig. This was not designed to add anything onto it. Then there is the problem of how to run the cord out. The eyelet accesory probably isn’t long enough so you’d need to use the extension cord and where does it lie? Many people use a SUV as a SUV and throw all kinds of stuff in the hatch, probably not paying attention to where things land. I’d end up damaging the cord. I consider this a non-starter. This brings us to the connections under the hood for jump starting.
You can connect to the terminals under the hood, with the alligator clips and it does work. In order to close the hood, the clip has to lie nearly flat.
The positive terminal is a tight fit to the bolt
I’ve seen Macans in dealerships charging this way. But, that’s in a showroom with the hood up. The upside to this method is that if the power goes out, then the CTEK should restart from the beginning, quickly going through the 8 steps to the point it left off. However, if it were in pulse mode, I’d expect it would wait 10 days before going back to pulse mode.
There are two downsides. First, constantly opening and closing the hood is an aggravation. The hood release feels like a cheap piece of plastic that could break one day. The hood is huge and you need to get the clips to lay flat if closing the hood. Second, the moment you open the hood, then close it, you cannot get an oil level reading until you drive maybe 10 miles or so. YMMV. The downsides to this seem to outweigh the positive. Unless fear of a power outage is real, I do not see this as a reasonable solution with the alligator clips.
The last way to charge is via the cigarette lighter adapter. I don't know if the other outlets will work. Somewhere back around 2015, somebody mentioned that you could get the dealer to "code" the lighter to remain hot. I haven't seen this can happen recently. So this is under the assumption it shuts down after some short period of time.
Before going into the steps, there is one huge downside to all of this, and that's the user interface. It seems thats its mired in the mid-2000s while the world has moved on to "there's an app for that". By this I mean that I can sit somewhere else, BBQ some steaks, and know exactly the temperature of the pit and the internal temp of the steaks, remotely by looking at a tiny device or an app on a phone. I can turn lights on/off in the house from anywhere in the world. Yet, in order to see the status of these devices, one has to physically go to them and look at some lights. First world problems to be sure but IMO 10 year old technology. IMO, there should be an app for that, to include remote turning the unit on and off, as well as to know, reasonably close, the number of minutes left to finish charging. In 2008 this felt like magic, bringing a dead battery back to life. Today, the user interface, IMO, feels old. That's not criticism of the charging technology but my opinion that society has got me used to just looking at a phone, and getting an immediate answer.
Continued in the next post.
