Polaris ATV Winter Maintenance Tips

What preventative maintenance should you do on a Polaris ATV during the winter? A few simple things like changing the oil, adding fuel stabilizer and hooking up the battery to a charger ought to do the trick.

Partzilla’s Polaris ATV expert John Talley hosts live Q&A sessions on our YouTube channel every Friday at 3pm Eastern. In this session, John was asked to provide some winter maintenance tips for a 2002 Polaris Sportsman ATV.

Polaris Sportsman winter maintenance tips

Polaris Sportsman ATV Winter Maintenance Q&A

I have a 2002 Polaris Sportsman I don’t drive a lot in the winter. Do you have any suggestions on winter maintenance I should be doing on it?

John Talley: First thing, well, we did a series on how to winterize your machine. But just really quick, believe it or not, go ahead and change the oil, because you don’t want to leave contaminated oil in it. Because when it builds up, it’s almost acidic and it’ll do damage to the inside of the case, the gears, and whatever else is flying around in there. So go ahead and do an oil change, and then fill the tank all the way up with fuel. I usually go with non-ethanol and the highest octane I can get. Then pour in some fuel stabilizer. At that point, run the engine and let the stabilizer work its way through the fuel system, maybe two or three minutes. Other than that, pick up a battery tender, disconnect the battery and let the tender take care of things. As simple as that. Hopefully that way you’ve done enough preventative maintenance, so that all you’ll have to do in the spring is check the pressure in the tires, and then take off after you’ve connected the battery, of course.