Anybody able to say whether those starter chargers due at aldo this week are much use - to start a 2 litre petrol and a 2 litre diesel? I remember a few months ago Lidl had some pretty good units at about the same price - are these the same? From memory they don't seem as hefty as the Lidl ones.
Will you make use of it? £29.99 I think. Buy a battery charger for home use- about £13 in Argos, and carry a set of booster leads with your first aid kit. I've given many a stranded flat battery a start off my car. Luckily never required one myself. DaveK.
I bought one of the LIDL ones (only £19.99), starts my 1.5 diesel no problem. One of the most useful pieces of kit I've ever purchased. Even comes with both a wall and cigar lighter chargers, although I tend to hook it up to the car battery and run the engine for a short while. Remember to keep it charged though...don't let the meter reading fall below 11.2 volts.
HTH tox
I bought one of these types of unit from Argos a while back when they had them for £20. It's a 17aH seal lead acid battery and charger. I successfully used it to start my Mondeo 1.8TD for a week or so while my Alternator was nuked. It was needed about three times over the week.
As a seperate comment, at least I know, for no good reason, that my TD will run on 10.7v... It got that low after a week of use with lights and occasional heating. It's all fixed now, at great expense.
Robertv!
You must be following me about Tox.
Rv! P.S. The Lidl power meter is doing well. :)
LOL, I'm pleased to hear it's working well.
Best Wishes tox
That's nowt, my Iveco turbodaily van, with a 2.8 TD engine runs with the battery voltage at 8 volts,
found that out when the gimps that re-conditioned my engine didnt connect the alternator up properly, and i'd been running around for 3 days with no charge, battery was too dead to spin the starter after the 3rd day, so bump started her on the slight camber of the supermarket car park i was in, the bump start worked fine as the engines direct injection, so dosent need glow plugs to start, and starts up on the first to second revolution of the engine.. could have got her going by hand if i had a large enough socket to fit on the bottom pulleys bolt :)
if your wondering, a diesel engine needs no electricity to run.. it called a compression ignition engine because it fires the fuel mixture on the heat caused by the high compression of air in the cylinder,
So once it's starter it'll run untill the fuel runs out.. BUT all modern engines have an electric fuel stop solenoid to shut the engine down (as the engine will run for as long as it's got fuel, you stop them by shutting off the fuel supply, so when you turn the key to off, you remove power to a small solenoid that holds a plunger out of the fuel inlet to the injection pump)
The solenoid will stay energised down to about 5 volts on my engine i found out by messing about with a variable resistor and volt meter just to find out how long i could have carried on for.. but when i had no charging each press of the brake pedal drew more power from the flat battery, and the engine faltered a little as the voltage to the stop solenoid was reduced.
if i had to i could have taken the plunger out ofthe solenoid and driven for ever, the iveco handbook even tells you how to do that, and the factory tool kit includes a bent spanner to get at the stop solenoid to take the plunger out if it ever fails!!! you of course have to stall the engine to stop her if you take the stop plunger out.
more useless info brought to you by someone with faaar too much time on is hands :)
Only older ones. Modern ones have similar injection setups to petrol cars, so need electrickery for the pump, injectors and ECU, etc.
Both my Xantias have a "stop lever" on the injector pump...
-- James
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