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HF 3 Stage Charger - thoughts?

Anybody got any +/- words about this 3 Stage unit.

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Reply to
Red Green
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It's a joke. The thing is a 1.5 amp trickle charger. Something with that low an output doesn't need 3 stages.

You can leave a 12 volt car battery hooked up to an "always on" 1.5 amp charger indefinitely without causing any harm. It will maintain a charged car battery, but it probably couldn't charge a dead one.

Walmart sells an excellent name-brand (schumacher) 3 stage smart charger that has custom settings for flooded, Gel and AGM batteries.

25 amps max. Less than $50.
Reply to
salty

That particular unit should work ok. It's not rocket science to maintain or float a charge on a battery. I use something similar made by Schauer. It was made for motorcycle batteries but works fine on an auto battery. Nice to have a fully charged battery when the outside temp dips below zero.

Reply to
Jeff The Drunk

Scratch the Schauer it a Schumacher MC-1 Manual Trickle Charger.

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Reply to
Jeff The Drunk

You have to buy it then test it, cut in and out V, full charge floating Voltage. It may be good, it may be junk and ruin your battery. Expensive ones ive seen you can test and adjust. Buy it and try it.

Reply to
ransley

My experience with a HF brand "float charger". It boiled a quart and a half of water out of my marine batter. which never held a charge, again. I'd put this on a lamp timer, so it only came on an hour a day, if you leave it on.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

If it is over 13.3v 1.5a will ruin a battery, You dont know how high or or what voltage the charger puts out, it may be the other case where it never puts out enough. Until something is tested with a meter you wont know.

Reply to
ransley

You are wrong on several counts. A 1.5 amp charger is not really even considered a "charger" It is a battery maintainer. It will keep a battery that is already charged from self discharging, but that's about all it will do. The 3 stages of a "charger" that small are useless. If that 1.5 amp charger is putting out 16 or 17 volts unloaded, it will be barely able to keep a car battery topped up. When you connect it to the battery, it won't still be putting out 16 or 17 volts. I PROMISE. And what makes you think anything over 13.3 volts will harm the battery? At such low amperage, you aren't going to heat anything up, which is the over-voltage danger with a real charger. Gel Cells are more sensitive to over voltage than flooded or AGM batteries, but at 1.5 amps, even they won't be harmed by 15 or 16 volts. This thing is simply not powerful enough to harm a car sized battery.

Reply to
salty

Gel

Depends what you mean by HARM. Yes it won't explode or catch fire or damage it in the short term.

But if you continue to charge a fully charged battery so that the terminal voltage goes much above 14V, it will reduce the long term life of the battery. By long term I mean the battery may need to be replaced after 2 years instead of after 7 years.

Mark

Reply to
Mark

Or in my case, after a couple months.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

This is a fairly good tutorial about charging car batteries.

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I'd take a chance on this charger but I would also leave a volt meter on it and make sure the voltages are somewhere close to the above tutorial before I trusted it. 1.5 amps can indeed charge a completely charge a dead car battery, but it will take days to do it.

I used to go through a lot of batteries on my 2 1970 husky bolens garden tractors. They supposedly never had the best charging system. To make things worse, sometimes they sit for months at a time without being used. I put a similar charger on both of them and it's made a world of difference. Batteries that only lasted 2 years now are going on their

5th year and are still going strong.
Reply to
Tony

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might help you learn

Reply to
ransley

Not if the charger is 1.5 amps, and it is connected to an average sized car battery. It simply doesn't have enough power to do anything that will cause either short or long term harm to the battery. And, once again, having "three stages" in a 1.5 amp charger is absurd and meaningless. If you want to be paranoid, just an automatic cutoff would suffice. Not really needed, though.

Reply to
salty

I won't pick it apart line by line, but right off the bat it has glaring errors and omissions. One of the first things he says is that you won't find proper 3-stage chargers at Walmart or auto parts stores. That's just complete bullshit, leading me to immediately question if the writer knows anything at all, or if he is just making stuff up, or misquoting things he "heard somewhere"

I wouldn't call that a "fairly good tutorial" at all.

Reply to
salty

Ransley - a 1.5 amp trickle charger will not charge a completely dead car battery because the dead battery will immediately suck the output voltage down well below 12 volts, where NO charging can take place. You can't charge a 12 volt car battery with 8-10 volts coming out of the charger.

A 1.5 amp charger will also never have enough power to heat the plates of a fully charged car battery, so all it can ever hope to do is keep the battery "topped up" and make up for constant battery drains from things like digital clocks, stereo tuning presets, etc, and self discharge.

You arguments would apply to small 10-12 amp hour motorcycle batteries, not 80-100 amp hour car batteries.

Reply to
salty

It covers the basics for those who don't know the basics not going to deep to go over their heads. And yes, I bought one of my charger/maintainers at WalMart but they haven't had that or a similar unit in stock in the past 3 years. Three years with no battery maintainers. Maybe your walmart is different.

Reply to
Tony

What good are "basics" if they are wrong?

Reply to
salty

My Harbor Freight trickle charger (smaller than the one in the discussion) electrolyzed the water out of my marine battery, which never held a charge after that. I'd be careful stating that a 1.5 amp charger will do no harm.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

OK, if you say so. Maybe you can write or suggest something better to read? I'd appreciate it, seriously!

Reply to
Tony

Pretty much impossible. My guess is that your battery was already bad. That's probably why you put the trickle charger on it in the first place.

I have an AGM marine battery that is permanently connected to an unregulated 20 watt solar panel that puts out about 18 volts unloaded when the sun hits it. AGM batteries are very sensitive to over voltage. The reason the 20 watt (2 amp) solar panel dosn't hurt the very expensive battery, is because of the low amperage involved. With a real battery charger putting out 10 or 20 amps (100-200watts) the voltage would be a factor, and 14.7 volts would be the maximum recommended charging voltage.

I have a second flooded deep cycle marine battery on a similar set up. I haven't had to add water to it in over 2 years.

Reply to
salty

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