What battery chargers do you use?

What I do is strip the wire about 3x the length and then fold the stripped part back on itself to make a bigger diameter, and then I proceed to crimp with the 10ga contacts. Then I use glue-lined heat shrink to strain relieve the wire.

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I do the same but still with a bushing to SB120 4 or 6 awf terminals, I can’t remember.

Dual walled adhesive lines heat shrink is a must for strain relief and moving the mechanical stress away from the terminal entrance where the wires tend to work harden and break!

Last time we did this, we crimped a short length of 10AWG wire into the SB50 terminals, then used an inline lever-nut to connect those wires to the stripped charger wires. Some heat-shrink over the pair of lever-nuts holds them together and closed. This made for a nice clean setup. If memory serves, there wasn’t much wire past the NOCO inline fuses so this also provided a little extra length there. No issues to date.

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We are testing out these Victron Blue Smart IP65 12V/5A units. Adjustable, automatic, and they have blue tooth interface but they are @$85/channel plus connectors: https://a.co/d/ivjB4sF
Get these generic SB50 conns. with 10/12awg pins: https://a.co/d/ciAYTB3
Lastly, big ol crimpers VEVOR Battery Cable Lug Crimping Tool on Amazon.
Batteries performed well with no brown outs at our last event.

We used to use Dual Pro chargers until I noticed they would often charge over 14.5 volts for a long time, which is above the recommended float voltage. We also noticed some venting and poor battery life.

So we switched to the Powersonic PSC-12400-ACX, which is quite inexpensive, $36 per channel, implements the recommended charging profile, and having many single-channel chargers seems like a better idea than multichannel chargers, from a failure-mode standpoint.

One of our students made this nifty charging station with ammeters, so we can see which batteries are actually floating at >0.01 A.

1293 bought six off of Allen’s recommendation years ago (was either 2019 or 2020, definitely the Before Times), and can confirm they are pretty dang bombproof. All we did was apply labels and cover over their screenprinted indicator for the battery gauge so it’s easier to glance and have an immediate answer on state of charge. Bougie teams might use light pipes instead, but nobody has ever accused 1293 of being bougie.

Hey Allen,

How did this do? Any recommendations?

We run that charger on our practice batteries. It does a fine job, nothing fancy for sure. When it first arrived the case was cracked in multiple places so we had to do a return, but we also were told to just keep the broken one. So we have one we use and another broken one that is in a mentors shop now. Both still work, and both charge batteries just fine with no noticeable difference in performance from out Battery Tender setup. We don’t do much analysis on practice batteries so I don’t have much data to supply other than when we turn it on, it works.

We’ve had it for two years if that makes a difference for reliability.

From our experience, I strongly suggest not using this tool, or others like it.

TL;DR: The dies are made for metric, not AWG, wire sizes. 6AWG wire is actually 13.3mm2 but the crimpers only give you 10 or 16 mm2 options. These are too small and too large, respectively.

Good to know! Honestly just having something this affordable for old practice batteries would be nice.

Thanks for the feedback!

@AllenGregoryIV if you also have any notes to add please do.

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What tool do you use? NVM I see the link. Thanks.
Weve also used the hammer smashing crimper (US made ver.)
So far nothing has come loose.
We had Spartan factory made cables come apart at the crimp. After that we started making our own.

We have 12 of these, haven’t had an issue with any of them.

@Akash_Rastogi I just realized I posted about two different chargers in this thread and thought we were talking about the other one.

We haven’t run the 4-bank charger yet, it’s still sitting in a box in the back of our lab.

I would love to see more of the innards of that battery charging station and know what parts you used. Also, where did you purchase the PSC-124000-ACX for $36?

the chargers came from https://batteryinthecloud.com/ which is apparently the main powersonic distributor:

the ammeters came from Adafruit:

I don’t have any pics handy, but I can take some this weekend. it’s a plywood panel ziptied inside a milk crate.

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