Trickle charger

[grumps]

Just brought my boat battery back to life with a ctek - great piece of kit!

[TonyP]

OP, food for thought...

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=104298&sid=6cf4e0f3 ... 93de90760f

Like Harvard, I'm now intending to switch it off periodically as mine (a CTEK 3.8 ) would appear to have let me down when connected for an extended period.

[BRC]

Been using a Lidl charger for years and I can say it has proved faultless in all that time. The battery is always ready to go even after weeks/months of being "maintained". Additionally it was able to very readily bring back a dead electric fence battery that had been dead for many, many months and one that no other charger could.

[ronk]

I’ve got a 12v golf cart maintenance charger. It cycles the battery between 12.7 and 13.5v - it has no bells or whistles, lights or mode selection - just connect to the under bonnet pins and forget it - It only cost me £8 from Makro years ago.

The zed hibernated in Nov 2017 and when I checked the other day the reading across the pins was 13.2v

I’ve got a Lidl charger just in case / back up plan.

[SonnyA85]

I have my Zed on a Ctek in the garage . It’s spot on

I also have another car on the Lidl one which was on offer at £13 !

That seems to be doing the job as well


But only the best for the Zed

I was never brave enough to try some of the cheaper conditioners. We have two Ctek 3.8's and they are superb.

I tend to leave on for a few days and then remove for a week. They should do their own conditioning though.

Anything with a three stage charge strategy. CTEK as above are alright, but you're paying a lot more than is necessary.

It's all thesame tat, just car forumites get conned into spending CTEK money because they don't know any better. But when you have 50 similarly-uneducated people all singing the same tune, it's easy to get sucked in.

The chip inside a CTEK which controls charging is about $2. It's the same or similar chip as in a £10 charger which offers 'smart' charging. There is no voodoo in battery charging.

A battery charger if made well is no different to any other. The technology is really simple and paying over the odds for a ctek is throwing money away.

I recommend the ring smart chargers. For the reason you can get a more powerful charger than the ctek for less than half the money.

12 amp - £68
https://www.amazon.co.uk/RSC612-Battery ... rt+charger

The ctek 10 amp charger is £138.

Ring comes with a 5 year warranty. Therefore it is a much better buy.

The majority of battery chargers are all the same, fundamentally. They have a power supply (perhaps the 'heavy' ones you talk of have a linear power supply rather than switch-mode), a charge IC of some sort (either off the shelf by someone like Maxim, Linear, National Semiconductor etc.), an output stage (basically one or more FETs).. and well, that's about it.

CTEK is no different. There's no magic.

The main difference, and is of negligible value, is the CTEK does more phases than the standard three (Constant current -> constant voltage -> float). It has a phase at the start designed to clean the plates in the battery to try and improve battery performance. I was designing chargers which did this back in the early 90's. In the industry it's called 'flex' charging, when you pulse positive X amount of times then either quickly short or reverse polarity on charge for a single Y stab. It's not new, it's not magic and CTEK certainly don't own the technology. Other chargers do it.

I am simply trying to provide some facts which will hopefully make people think a little and not just follow the crowd. Some people will, some people won't, that's just the nature of things.

There are plenty of chargers in the £15-20 price bracket which will do a perfectly adequate job. No need to spend any more than that.

There's also a common misconception that you need a certain level of charger for batteries of certain capacities. This isn't really true, especially in the realm of car batteries. The only difference it really makes is how long it takes to charge! For example if you have a 100Ah battery, you probably want it to charge within a day or so (from flat), so your charge current (during the initial CC phase) will most likely need to be in the region of 12 amps or so. A cheaper 4 amp charger would take 3-4 days to charge a battery of that size from a heavily discharged state.

This is why I recommend the more powerful charger the 12 amp so it charges quicker from flat. However if all you need is a trickle then a 2 amp or 4 amp is fine but should you ever need to use it on a flat battery it will take much longer than the ring I've recommended.

There is nothing wrong with ctek chargers they are good chargers just extremely overpriced.

Either get a cheap one or get the ring one I've linked. So long as it's smart you should be fine.

[Z4C_er]

I bought a Ring one at Maplin the other day and connected it up to the battery terminals today. It has eyelets for permanent connection with a fused plug that you can just leave in the trunk when you are driving and then just plug in when left tin the garage. Seems great!