Lidaldi battery charger

If it is like mine, it *needs* to be connected to a battery before it'll do anything!

Avpx

-- REMIND ME AGAIN, he said, HOW THE LITTLE HORSE-SHAPED ONES MOVE. Death on symbolic last games (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods) Sun 11303 Sep 19:45:01 BST 1993

I did try it on a battery first ...

If the battery is too flat it won’t “boot”. Sometimes it needs a jumpstart to get it going

Tim

The battery was last charged about 3-4 months ago (on a different charger) so I thought it deserved another top-up by now. I've not taken a voltmeter to it, but it still runs a 12v lamp at decent brightness ...

Just to follow up that I had similar behavior on one of those chargers - to the extent of buying a replacement one - only to discover that it was indeed a dead/dying battery that this style of charger wouldn't 'jumpstart'. YMMV of course

J^n

I'll excavate the better charger from whichever box it's hiding in ...

Its the button switch which has broken I had the same thing and posted about it on here some years ago

I used an Lidl 4 amp ('Ultimate Speed' - it's the slowest charger ever) on Saturday. Battery was completely flat and the charger LCD just said 'Err'. I connected it up to a 1980s dumb transformer charger and it took 7A. After a short while I hooked up the Lidl charger in parallel and it said the battery was up to 9.7V. Left them both going for a bit, battery went up to

If the connections to the battery aren't good it'll only engage 'motorbike' or 'car' mode, but not 'ice' mode which is used for AGM batteries.

So, assuming a similar design, something isn't right if it won't change modes. A dodgy button is a good thought. If there's nothing displayed then check the connections - even in the wrong mode it should show something on the display.

Theo

I'll see how easily it comes apart to test the switch, it has 7 LEDs but the only one that comes on is "Standby"

The CTEK charger skipped straight to stage 4 (constant voltage, falling current) and by the time I'd gone back to check on it, it was in trickle mode.

If it's anything like mine the battery needs to be connected and the charger automatically determines the terminal voltage. If the terminal voltage is below a certain level it defaults to its 6V charging mode with all other modes inhibited.

Mine has packed up 3 times and it has always been on the 12v side, either a bad joint/broken wire at the croc clip or once a broken wire as it went into the charger

I don't know if my Aldi charger was a Tronic or not, but it worked perfectly until one day it let all the smoke out and spectacularly died, as though it was in the Paris Olympics Closing Ceremony.

slightly suspicious that it died while it was lent-out, but it doesn't smell fried, I'll take it apart tomorrow ...

I had to get hold of a 2mm triangular security bit, opened it up, output leads were securely soldered to PCB, can't detect push-button contacts closing with multimeter, probably need to de-solder it from PCB to be sure ...