Battery Tester

"Peter Spikings" wrote

Depends what you mean. A drop tester is about £40 upwards, an acid strength tester is about £1.50.

The £12.99 thing from Lidl sounds worth having though.

I meant something which loads the battery and watches what happens, hence detecting end of life batteries which hold their charge as long as there's no load :)

Indeed. I reckon I'll go get one. If anyone else is interested they go on sale Monday but it might be limited to a few stores.

Peter.

0.8A is way too heavy to charge a 1.2Ah cell - you really want about .3A or so. Anyway - it won't kill it, just lower the life. I assume you know that it'll take about 85A/(3.6A * 0.75) = 31 hours to charge it fully? Otherwise, it should work just fine.

I assume 14.7V is for 'rapid charge' of nearly charged batteries, rather than slower charging. the first mode is probably for small batteries.

Yeah, I just need to top them up as they're currently unused. My understanding is that if you deplete them to 100% you also substantially reduce their life. What's the 0.75 for - Energy lost charging?

It'll be the last stage of normal charging won't it?

Peter

Yes, charge efficiency of lead-acid batteries is around 70-85% - I don't remember exactly where the number ends up.

Well... Lead acid batteries will completely charge at 14.4V.

The only justification for 14.7 is a more rapid completion of the charge at the very end - though it may actually cause damage if left on for more than a few minutes in some cases.

spent some time looking for chargers recently, the one I went for was a SIP one from worldofpower. Very heavy and well built automatic control. They say you should charge at 10% of capacity. Might have a look at the lidl one for Bike batteries.

If I buy one of these, can I take in all my car batteries, charge them (seperately), and not worry about it? I'm not a fan of getting one in the house and charging it, incase it kills my wife. Hang on... how would I make it explode??

Is the lidl battery charger suitable for just about any recent car battery? Just for clarification purposes, not a fan of buying from halfords, and the item itself looks good on the lidl website, from the blurb.

Doesn't look bad for the price. The booklet says it's a 3 phase charger enabling recharging to almost 100% of original capacity. Goes into float mode once fully charged so can be left connected for long periods.

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 16:31:06 -0000, David R wrote= :

It'll be slow but fine.

Absorption volt charging voltage depends on the battery type (plate chemistry) and electrolyte temperature. At 25 degrees C, 14.4 VDC is a good number for a wet, non sealed Low Maintenance (Sb/Ca) car battery, but to high for certain gel cell batteries, for example, Sonnenschein. It is to low to fully charge wet, sealed "Maintenance Free" (Ca/Ca) car batteries, which typically require 14.8 VDC. The amount of current accepted normally determines the speed of the charge of a battery.

To increase the service life of car batteries, I highly recommend an occasional charge with an external charger matched to the battery type to prevent sulfation from stratification and undercharging. If the cells are not balanced and equalization charge will help balance them.

Please see Section 9 in the Car and Deep Cycle Battery FAQ on

for more information on charging and chargers.

Kindest regards,

BiLL......