Battery Charger Poll

[Bruceb]

What battery charger do you use.
We have been using 6 of the KOP chargers but are having some of them fail and are looking for a best new solution.
I have heard some use the KOP charger
some use the AM one bank charger
some use the AM 3 bank charger and I have see a post
for the Battery Tender 10 bank charger.

[Cecil]

We have two of the Dual Pro RS3 chargers in a custom made battery cart. We typically bring 6 batteries to competition with us and have a strict rotation we follow to ensure maximum charge.

Edit: Added photos of our charging cart. Students took on this project themselves to avoid lifting a much heavier cart into the back of a school bus. Still needs a bit of decoration but it is functional.

[ChuckDickerson]

We have had a charging station using 12 of the KoP type chargers for several years. We are building new modular 6 battery charging stations for this competition season around AutoMeter BusPro-660 6 bank chargers designed specifically to charge and maintain AGM batteries.

[Bruceb]

dang those are pricey but are our sealed lead acid batteries AGM's?

[MrForbes]

We use 5 of the old KOP chargers from the 2006-2008 era. They still work, I guess.

[ChuckDickerson]

Originally Posted by Bruceb

dang those are pricey but are our sealed lead acid batteries AGM's?

We don't know if yours are because we don't know what batteries your team is using this year. Our team is going to give PowerSonic PS-12180-NB batteries a try this year which are AGM.

[AllenGregoryIV]

We use these battery chargers. We have gotten them for as low as $23 in the past.

[GeeTwo]

We have an utterly mixed bag of chargers, most of them donated or purchased from auto parts shops. We've learned how to crimp an Anderson battery connector onto a wide variety of wires.

[Levansic]

Last year we were afflicted with many battery maladies. We got a CBA IV, at the same time we switched from the old KOP chargers to NOCO Genius G3500 battery chargers, found on Amazon. We found that our old KOP chargers were only charging our batteries to between 25-50% of capacity. We don't know how they degenerated to this state, just that they were a large part of our battery-related problems.

The new chargers worked faster, and fully charged our batteries. Combined with testing on the CBA IV, we discovered that these chargers give a diagnostic click to indicate bad cell problems that usually show up after the surface charge is quickly depleted on the field. They also have an AGM mode and a series of status lights that make it very easy to tell what state of charge a battery is in. Additionally, the NOCO chargers have automatic maintenance and repair modes for long term charging or recovery of heavily drained batteries.

Highly recommended! We have two, but I wish we had just one more. We had no issues keeping all of our batteries charged through a regional.

NOCO Genius G3500 UltraSafe Battery Charger

[Bochek]

We use Noco Genius G7200 battery chargers.

While they are a little on the expensive side I would highly recommend them!

[MrBasse]

After burning up two KOP chargers and noticing that the fans in them fail after a year or two, we got the big Battery Tender.

Well worth the $450 we paid for it. If you have enough batteries to keep it fully loaded, you'll never need more than two amps to charge a battery. Plus it is made by a company named after maintaining batteries...

[Bruceb]

anybody else?

[Wferr]

Originally Posted by MrBasse

Well worth the $450 we paid for it.

If you dont mind me asking... How did you get it at that price

[Chris_Ely]

Originally Posted by MrBasse

we got the big Battery Tender.

Well worth the $450 we paid for it. If you have enough batteries to keep it fully loaded, you'll never need more than two amps to charge a battery. Plus it is made by a company named after maintaining batteries...

We got the same charger, and we love it. We never half to worry about having a charged battery at competition. By the time we get through 5 or 6 batteries, the first one is already fully charged again.

By the way, I love your charging station!

[Bruceb]

Originally Posted by Cecil

We have two of the Dual Pro RS3 chargers in a custom made battery cart. We typically bring 6 batteries to competition with us and have a strict rotation we follow to ensure maximum charge.

Edit: Added photos of our charging cart. Students took on this project themselves to avoid lifting a much heavier cart into the back of a school bus. Still needs a bit of decoration but it is functional.

You know those batteries are supposed to be charged standing up??