Because of my relatively low mileage, and recognising that 'modern cars' are always slowly draining their batteries, I used to periodically charge my previous car (2016 Mini Clubman Cooper D) throughout the winter months. This always ensured easy cold weather starts, but an occasional overnight was always sufficient, and there was no unforgiving battery saver mode so the courtesy lights never failed to illuminate when getting in/out the car!

Having tolerated a few months of frequent battery saver mode activations and regular trickle charge maintenance, I finally decided to follow the many recommendations on these forums and have altered the battery target SOC to 95%.   Hopefully I've done it all correctly and my battery and Focus will still be there tomorrow!  I am still persisting with the original fitted battery, and will see how that goes before going for an upgraded battery – perhaps in the winter.

For the record, and if it helps anybody else –  I have a Mk 4.5 Focus, and the Forcan process ran largely as described elsewhere. I used the widely recommended Vgate vLinker FS USB cable, with the free Forscan extended licence.  I don't have a real Windows laptop, so used Windows 7 running as a 'virtual machine' on my MacBook Pro, without any significant problems.  There was a need to update the vLinker firmware, install the appropriate windows driver etc., but the following forum vLinker firmware discussion was helpful.

On 4/14/2025 at 5:25 PM, mad-mushroom said:

…. I finally decided to follow the many recommendations on these forums and have altered the battery target SOC to 95%.   …

Follow-up question: Just out of interest, does altering the battery target SOC have an effect on the auto stop-start system? Does raising the target to 95% (from the original 80%) mean that the battery would have further to charge before auto stop-start is activated.
I’m not overly concerned about this, and as I usually manually inactivate the A system on short hop around town runs, I haven’t yet noticed any change. I’m due for some longer trips this coming week so was just wondering what to expect. 
 

Edit:  Looking more carefully at @unofix’s colour coded battery table, the likely answer to my question is — probably not.  It appears <69% is the value that  stop-start is inactivated.