1) Buy and keep the eye wash bottles. They are the right pH and have a preservative in them so they will last for 10 years sitting around.
2) Have a box of baking soda handy. It's eye wash for your tractor. Related topic: Everyone has a small dry chemical fire extinguisher handy, yes?
3) Lakeside's post = eye protection needed. Always.
4) Transit refers to this, but have not seen it explicitly posted. When you put more than 13.8 VDC on a lead acid battery, it starts to make hydrogen (electrolysis). So a "tender" is a battery charger with a regulated output voltage that can't "boil the battery".
Some people weld, I throw parts around on circuit boards, so I made a few chargers for my stuff that output 13.75 volts current limited at 5 amps, and you can short them out and feed them an over voltage. So I charge using these and can leave them on when I crank.
My hope with this post is that when people are looking to buy a battery tender, they will have some idea what's going on. You should be able to plug one in, measure the voltage on it, and see less than 13.8 volts.
5) There are fancy things a charger can do to tell you things about your battery, such as bringing the voltage up and measuring current flow into the battery. This is a way you can tell if it's charged. They can also put a small load on the batter and seeing how much the voltage drops. This can tell you if a battery is bad and needs changing. These are little tests that can be done in less than a second, and might be done once a minute or so. I mention them in case anyone sees funny stuff going on when working with a fancy pants charger.
6) Standby lead acid wet batteries (non gell cell) tend to have a slightly shorter life if they just sit around for years than if they are cycled correctly every now and then. My backup generator battery pretty much just sits around on one of my tender-type chargers, so I just change it every 4 years. If I was using it correctly, it would last around 5 years, maybe more.
I've posted on other forums that no one really understands batteries, including me, so YMMV.
Pete