Topic: Original battery charger ...

[alexbromo]

Finally, monday i bought the new battery for C5: a nice (quite) expensive 45Ah gel.
The vendor recomended to charge the battery at 13.8V @ 4A max, to avoid damages, and tried to sell me a specific charger priced 120 Euro (!!!) 
I remembered the old Sinclair charger, so i recovered it and plugged to the battery and it seems to work.
The red LED has lit and the charger current was 2.8 A.
Do you think this charger should be ok for my battery ?

Now the charger is running, so i will see if it will stop when the baterry voltage will reach
13.8V or more.

Is this charger protected against the shortcut or overcharge ?
Is there some technicla specs of it ?

Alex Bromo

[Karl]

I'm not sure if there is any technical data about the Sinclair chargers on the 'net.

My main fear has always been leaving them unattended during charging due to their age. 26years is quite old for the wiring. Having said that, they are good chargers and I have used one to charge a 70ah leisure battery with no problems.

Do you have to be extra careful because of the gel ? I think the BVS mentioned that getting it wrong can cause the gel to "bubble" away from the plates causing the battery to die much sooner than it should.

[Jonny]

I have 4 10ah gel type batteries . To charge them I wire 2 in parallel and charge them using a 10  year old 5 amp halfords battery charger which works great! It doesn't have any type of protection but I just charge them whilst watching tv and check the batteries with a multimeter every 15 minuites.

I'd recommend having a look for a 5 amp charger and use that. After you've charged the battery once I think you can charge at a higher amperage.

I've got 1.5amp charger with protection circuitary that lying around although it would take much longer to charge than a 5 amp charger.

You could use a universal battery charger such as the pro peak quattro. You can set the charging amperage aswel as alot of other settings. It's a universal charger so you can also use it to charge any nimh/nicad/lipo batteries aswell ( this makes it very popular with us robot builders)

Sorry I can't post a link to the pro peak quatro; using my iPhone as my Internet is Down. Not sure when it'll be fixed as it's a problem with the wire.

[jk]

My understanding is that all differrent battery types, ie lead acid, gel, calcium, etc require different charging rates, or the battery will have a reduced life.
I have also found that if I charge a gel cell with my sinclair charger, it seems that it is not fully charged when the green light comes on.
jason