[Shop-talk] Battery Starter/Charger

[John Miller]

On 9/6/2018 2:39 PM, Scott Hall wrote:
> I have had several varieties of the 'jump boxes'. They're fine if the 
> battery is just dead enough to not start the car.
> 
> For diesels or truly drained batteries, you want the old-fashioned 
> charger/starter.
> 
> And the one I had was older than me (well, probably not, but still) and 
> died, so I'm looking too.


Well...

I have a Li-Ion jump start pack that works pretty well on anything where 
the car being jumped has at least enough juice to light up the interior 
lights.  But yeah, it has to be kept charged.

The lunchbox jump-starters never did crap for me.  They'd work for a 
while, maybe, but you couldn't leave them on the charger, and they 
didn't work for anything more than half-discharged.

Serious battery chargers come in a couple flavors, one is the high-amp 
transformer and one is the supposedly 'smarter' modern flavor.

The best unit I've had in terms of overall functionality was a Vector 
thing, it would charge at a reasonable rate AND it had a pulse/desulfate 
mode that actually worked.

If you're dealing with a lead/acid car battery that's been dead for a 
while a charge won't do crap, it might start the car and then it'll die 
again as soon as you shut it off.  The hardcore battery techies will 
tell you that the desulfate modes built into commercial chargers are a 
joke, but some of them DO in fact work fairly well.

Alas, the Vector stuff was a great design but not well made, and 
eventually bought by Black & Decker then killed off.  Then I bought a 
Schumacher thing that supposedly had a desulfate cycle but you couldn't 
select it manually and it was basically useless.

These days the item of choice is a Noco Genius 7200 which doesn't have a 
huge-fast jump-start mode but it does do everything else very well, and 
the pulse/desulfate mode works at least as well as the Vector, and it's 
got a bunch of other modes for 6V and oddball batteries.  I had an older 
smaller Noco 3500 that wasn't half as good, but this one is very nice.

John.