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Actually 30 mi. on just battery power is pretty good.
The real problem with leaving the battery hooked up in the car for anything more than a couple weeks is that there is constant current draw through several circuits/components of the car.
As the battery wears down, current delivery becomes sporatic as the battery continues it's internal chemistry - sometimes there is enough power to charge the circuit and others, there isn't - the drain is not at all linear as one might expect.
This can introduce power surges, arcing inside components such as relays and switches, and actually cause these to fail. The diode pac in the alternator is particularly susceptible to this kind of non-constant current flow and why we see so many alternators fail at springtime.
It's so simple to access the battery on these cars that's it's beyond me why anyone would store the car with the battery hooked into the car's circuitry.
I know there is a lot of myth out there about losing the DME's adaptive settings, but that's not at all a problem. Once the car is running regularly again, the DME will re-adapt in short order, unless of course there are other issues which remained 'masked'. But if that's the case, the DME losing it's settings wasn't the problem to begin with.
It seems pretty clear that the best, and certainly the safest, way to store the car (whether using a battery maintainer or not), is to disconnect the battery from the car's circuitry for the duration of the storage period. In fact, I believe it's better to remove the battery altogether to remove all risk of a battery explosion, fire, or leak - any of which would get really expensive, really fast!
Cheers!
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