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22/3/2019 at 1:46am
Location: North Wales
Outfit: Elddis
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I have two Lidi chargers, and as an experiment I recharged my 75 Ah leisure battery with it plugged into an energy monitor wifi connected to PC so I could see when it switched to each stage. It starts at 3.8A next is 3A then 0.8A then 0.1A and it will if a really good battery or small battery actually switch off.
As to speed what is interesting is how long it charges at full 3.8A and within 15 minutes it had switched from 3.8A to 3A, it then charged at 3A for around a day before dropping to 0.8A and that took another 8 hours before it reached final stage at 0.1A.
This was quite a surprise, I had expected the 3.8A charge rate to have been held for a few hours, but it's not the ability of the charger that extends the time, but the ability of the battery to absorb the energy that determines how long it takes.
I now have a VRLA that was on the car, and as yet not really discharged it enough to fully test, however it does seem to accept the charge quicker and does remain on the 3.8A rate for longer.
But it does not really matter if the charger starts at 3.8A or 38A if that stage is really short, then looking at less than 5 minutes difference in charging times, as it's the battery that limits the charge accepted rather than the charger.
Clearly if you a prepared to top up the battery and expect a short life then as with fork lifts one can really bang in the charge, and get away with just 8 hours on charge, but to fully charge with a charger which will not boil the battery i.e. one safe to use with VRLA then your looking at 2 days.
I had problems with the mobility scooter, that also has a stage charger and before going away I plugged the charger into a 150W inverter and it charged fine, however after the scooter had been used, the charger wanted to use over 150W and the inverter simply closed down, I did not have a bigger inverter so had to find a mains supply to charge it from.
I think the mobility scooter has two 20 Ah batteries, so even with no losses it would need 40 Ah to charge, with loses more like 60 Ah so in real terms can't really expect to charge it from your leisure battery. Neither can you hope to charge it from a cig lighter as a cig lighter can't deliver enough power. The other problem was the mobility scooter has to be built up to charge, you can't simply charge the batteries off the scooter, although my car could carry it built up, most can't so very hard to charge while travelling.
I see no good reason why you should not be able to remove the battery for charging just like I do with the electric bike, and with the electric bike there is an option between fast chargers and standard chargers, but at the time of using the scooter I could not find a unit able to charge batteries off the scooter.
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22/3/2019 at 12:23pm
Location: North Wales
Outfit: Elddis
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With three 140 Ah batteries on a narrow boat the charger was good for 35 amp, it had three modes, float, AGM and flooded and in flooded mode one had to top up the batteries every two weeks.
Although we assume lead acid, we don't know what breed of lead acid, and to keep battery light enough to carry it may well be AGM or other name is VRLA, these batteries can not be topped up, once dried out all you can do is weigh them in.
So you can speed up charging, but to do so needs a very cleaver battery charger that pulses charge into the battery and works out state of charge by how quickly the battery voltage decays between each pulse.
So there is a massive jump between £15 for a Lidi charger, and the £300 for a charger able to without damaging the battery charge it in a short time.
The same problem charging a battery from the car, with a float charge a battery may take 50 amp just after starting, but within a very short time it's down to 5 amp if that.
So Lidi or Aldi is less than £20 and to better that the Ctek caravan battery charger XS 25000 charger is around £589 from Amazon, that is a huge jump in price.
Remember Ctek make many chargers, some are not as good as the Lidi one as does not have voltmeter built in, and others are really good, there is a reason why Ctek make the XS 25000 for caravans, if a MSX 5.0 was good enough they would not make the XS 25000.
So difference is time, the XS 25000 is faster, but throughout history we have tried to fast charge lead acid batteries for fork lifts and milk floats and they needed 10 hours to charge even with 100 amp stage chargers. You can bang in 80% in 6 hours but unless you actually fully charge once a week the battery will not last long.
There have always been Nickel Iron batteries used on buses and milk tankers that can charge fast, today we have the NiMh and Ni/ion batteries again fast charge, be it my electric bike or phone these batteries can charge fast.
But lead acid move from 3.5 amp to 35 amp and the larger charger is not even twice as fast in many cases, as the battery simply can't take the charge that fast, and have a reasonable life.
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28/3/2019 at 11:22am
Location: North Wales
Outfit: Elddis
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Be it a Lidi or Ctek or any other charger, for use with a caravan you don't want to have to select a function and press any start button.
It seems many Ctek chargers will return to full output when required, and restart charging after a power cut without needing to press a button.
But the Lidi charger I have will not return to 3.8A output or restart charging unless you press a button. This is actually good for bench charging as if a battery goes faulty it will not charge over 0.8 amp and if it becomes disconnected it fails safe.
However although carried as a spare for caravan, it would not replace the built in charger as it would soon default to 0.8 amp and never return to 3.8 amp.
Also it auto detects 6 volt batteries, which means under 7.5 volt it sees battery as 6 volt so fails to charge it, many of the Ctek can't charge 6 volt batteries, so the battery voltage can drop to around 3.5 volt and it will still recharge it.
The upper voltage is also a problem, once the Lidi charger has completed the pulse charge stage as it switches to 3.8A (set to large battery) or 0.8A (set to small battery) the voltage can spike above 15 volt (I think) at which point it thinks battery disconnected and switches off.
Although the features on the Lidi charger can be seen as a fault in design, they do mean it is safe to set an leave, as it fails safe. It also has a built in volt meter so you can see what is going on. If your going to try and bring back to life a sulphated battery it takes a long time, days or even weeks, so your not monitoring the battery, if it has a faulty cell, when the other cells recover, you don't want it to over charge produce hydrogen gas dry out battery and then spark lighting the gas and exploding. The design of the Lidi battery charger would not let this happen, can't really fault it for that.
With the built in battery charger for caravan I have smelt it when it went wrong and a cell shorted and turned it off, however unless you not only smell it but also realise what you are smelling (bad egg smell) then there could be a big bang.
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Topic: battery charger
via mobile 20/3/2019 at 5:06pm
