Battery Chargers

BossCat

BossCat

New Member
One thing that I dont own is a battery charger. Now that I have moved into electric bikes/motors etc its something i'll need to buy. As I know nothing about Volts/Watts/Amps, iv'e no idea what type to get? So im wondering if anyone can suggest a good battery charger.
My mate had/has some kind of super duper/bells n' whistles type digital battery charger he got of ebay, which he blew up a few weeks ago when he tried to charge up my Powabyke battery pack? - 12V charger + 36V battery pack = smoke/dead charger :D

Regards
Tom
 
Lesson one you already learned. The charger has to match the pack.
lesson two.. the cheap chargers that come with scooters will blow if you short them at all. Which I have done to at least three.

SLA only

My choice is three cheap battery chargers from wallymart real battery charges don't blow when you short them a millisecond. They have a battery tender for twenty bucks. I have three of those. I hook them to the batteries individually and then just go do something else. One to each battery and you can do this while they are still in the pack..

Now they charge at about 1.5 amps They are supposed to have a monitor so that they move to a lesser charge when they are full. Mine either don't work or they seldom get empty enough. Either way I figure charging time like th is, but I also check the battery with a meter after it has rested a couple of hours. I figure about how much the battery is down. If I guess that it is down half and it is a 12 hour battery then I need to put six amps in. Add about 25% for Kentucky windage, so I need about 8 amps at about 1.5 amps per hour. or about 6 hours. That seems to work pretty well...

NOW THIS IS FOR SLA ONLY.... for exotic batteries you need exotic chargers.

By the way if you want to save money and add to the time you can charge a 36volt pack with a 12 charger but you have to rewire it to parallel connections, not the series you have. When you do that you have one big butt 12v battery . Expect charging time to be three times as long.

Hope this helps.
 
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Deacon knows his stuff ! IF you want to be a little more familiar with these things , you can scavenge broken UPS units and play with them (they consists of charger and inverter). Plenty of good stuff in them.
 
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