Finally found a good automatic battery charger

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Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
Originally Posted By: 901Memphis
Wording on the Box...

"Designed and Engineered in the USA and manufactured in China to Clore's specifications"

FWIW - i don't care if it's made in China if it charges my battery perfectly without abusing it.

My question for you: If there is an identical charger made in USA that costs 40-50% more, which would you buy ?

Personally, I would choose made in USA model but as of now the only available one is made in China, so there isn't much choice.


I agree. Why some need to try to stir up polarization is beyond me...
 
OP, is this only connected with the clamps, or does it use a regular SAE 12V bullet plug?
 
Originally Posted By: 901Memphis
It also has something I've never seen before which is an exercise mode, where after finalizing the charge it puts a load on the battery and restarts. It will do this every 4 days or whenever the voltage gets to a certain point. That would make this a great battery maintainer that can be hooked up indefinitely.

If you have a power meter such as Kill-A-Watt will you try to hook it up see how much power this charger consume in maintainer mode ?

With all the circuits in this charger I think it may consumes north of 50-100 watts in maintainer mode.

Thanks.
 
It is good to be able to measure the amps flowing at a given voltage.

Put one of these on the charger's DC output and you can read:
Amps
Watts
Volts
Amp peak
Wattpeak
Amp hours
Watt hours
Voltage Minimum.

This should be adequate for a 20 amp charger as is. I use one on a 40 amp adjustable voltage power supply that I use as a manual charger, but I removed the provided 12 AWG leads and soldered 8 AWG cable to circuit board.

http://www.amazon.com/GT-Power-Analyzer-Consumption-Performance/dp/B00C1BZSYO

20141007_131331copy_zpsd7956c81.jpg
 
I do have a kill-a-watt, I'll update when I can test it.

Wrxsixeight, I real want more testing equipment like that buy don't currently have much besides the kill a watt and regular multimeters
 
It only has clamps that are permanently attached


I hooked it up to the kill a watt and it appears it pulls about 7.5 watts from 120v when idle in maintenence mode and not charging.
 
I left it hooked up to a battery and monitored it when I woke up. It actually goes down to only 5.5 watts when maintaining and it stays steady at 5.5 when you disconnect the battery too
 
I bought a new battery for my Altima and brought it home to charge it. It's the standard autocraft JCI based 24F.

It was only approximately 80% based on resting voltage and I watched again the voltage it was giving off, for some reason it went up to 14.90v for a short time and dropped back to 14.70v towards the last 10% of charge
 
that gassing charge at 16+ volts is just what a lazy partially sulphated battery needs.just dont forget it and cook it!
and dont use said charger on agm or gel.
i still have a few old battery boilers and they still have their place.
 
Originally Posted By: 901Memphis
Well after my diehard dh15a (rebranded Schumacher I believe) has been performing poorly for me, cooking my batteries with as much as 16.2+v during bulk charge I ended up finding a really nice automatic charger.

I got a Pro-Logix PL2320, which has tons of features for the price. It does 20/10/2 amp charging, both 6/12v, agm,gel,wet cells and is even temperature compensated!

I watched carefully as it charged an older 58R Exide based battery from 2009 that has been having some issues charging. It did not ever go above 14.7v in bulk mode which is about perfect. It successfully recovered the battery where my other charger would not and went from not being able to start the car to putting out about 400 cranking amps back from the dead.

Was also very impressed with how quiet it is even charging at 20 amps. It is fan cooled but it never got warm for me.

It also has something I've never seen before which is an exercise mode, where after finalizing the charge it puts a load on the battery and restarts. It will do this every 4 days or whenever the voltage gets to a certain point. That would make this a great battery maintainer that can be hooked up indefinitely.

I am really excited about it, I wish I had more batteries to charge.

I didn't even know about these chargers until I started looking for a temperature compensated charger, which is very hard in this price range. They are made by Clore Automotive which makes those jump and carry booster packs, I almost bought one of those before too and thought that's all they made.

If anyone is looking for a nice charger or maintainer I would highly recommend this based on my testing so far. It's really light years ahead of the store bought junk I've been using in the past.

Here's what it looks like.

503_PL2320_A3.jpg



I was looking at their website and they even have models available with a 100 amp jump start assistance mode, pretty cool stuff.





Does it temp compensate on both hot and cold temps? Many only do one or the other. More of an issue for a battery maintainer actually.
 
I charged my truck with it, all appeared good to go. Quickly charged it at 10 A and it reached 100%. Did not say bad like the craftsman kept saying.
 
I have read different opinions. When you are charging a standard lawnmower battery in the tractor itself, can you hook up directly up to the battery including the negative? When I connected it to the frame, it showed 54% and then when I connected to the battery itself it showed 95% and went into trickle mode. I know when you take it out you should put a leader on it, on the negative side.
 
I'm very interested. My question is this...would I benefit from buying this, considering I already use a Battery Tender? Doesn't the Tender use the same type of charging cycles?
 
Originally Posted By: circuitsmith
If you don't need to quickly recharge a depleted battery the tender is fine.


Thank you for the reply. Ya for the most part I just use the tender between my cars and the riding mower. I was just wondering if the reconditioning that the tender does was good enough compared to the smart charger.
 
I hooked her up to my U1R mower battery after removing from the lawnmower. It was at 45% charge and 12.1 V. I plugged it in, and within less than five minutes it is telling me that is 95% charged and 13.1 V. The fan never came on the charger until about 10 minutes into it. Could this thing be working properly or not?

This is the second time I've hope this battery up, last time it was in the mower. I guess I will wait until it says charging complete at 100%, maybe he has some magic to work. This is much different than my craftsman battery charger but took a dump on me. It just appears to have charged way too quickly.
 
Originally Posted By: rsylvstr
I hooked her up to my U1R mower battery after removing from the lawnmower. It was at 45% charge and 12.1 V. I plugged it in, and within less than five minutes it is telling me that is 95% charged and 13.1 V. The fan never came on the charger until about 10 minutes into it. Could this thing be working properly or not?

This is the second time I've hope this battery up, last time it was in the mower. I guess I will wait until it says charging complete at 100%, maybe he has some magic to work. This is much different than my craftsman battery charger but took a dump on me. It just appears to have charged way too quickly.


It's easily possible to bring up a small lawn and garden battery above 80%+ with high amp charging, you might want to avoid using the higher amp settings for these batteries unless you're in a hurry.

Lead acid is lazy so the last bit of charge takes quite awhile since they stop accepting huge amps after a certain point.

Yes the charger needs a little extra time to do it's full algorithm including applying load and re charging it. It's always finished overnight when I use it I've never timed it.


Also the fan likely won't kick on for smaller batteries since it's not working very hard on a lawn and garden battery. You can try charging a low vehicle battery and the fan should come on after a few minutes at 20 amps setting
 
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