charging a battery help

[guerney]

How well protected are chargers from power surges? With all the storms and usual winter power outages recently, I bought a new power surge protector specifically for my ebike battery charger.

 

[saneagle]

I'm a lover not an electrician... but as I uderstand it, the ickle tiny traffic cop demons which live inside those funny shaped cylinders and boxes etc. on the board, slow down electron pixies travelling at 12V or faster from a power supply into one pair of connectors, to the set voltage speeds scrawled on the board, before they exit from the other pair of connectors on the other side. Those speeds have been measured by elite higher ranked traffic cop demons living in much more expensive and far more accurate measuring gizmos than I can afford. If you shove 12V in one end and don't get the scrawled voltages out, your meter is not accurate. Pixies which refuse to slow down are eaten by demon cops.

I don't think they did that at all. They just looked in the plug and saw that the fuse wasn't right. The rest of what they said was probably just conjecture based on the unused fuse not being right.

 

[saneagle]

How well protected are chargers from power surges? With all the storms and usual winter power outages recently, I bought a new power surge protector specifically for my ebike battery charger.

In the 10 years I've been on this forum, nobody ever reported that a storm killed their ebike charger. Ebike chargers have inductors and transformers in them, so have their own surge protection.

 

[billyboya]

I'm a lover not an electrician... but as I uderstand it, the ickle tiny traffic cop demons which live inside those funny shaped cylinders and boxes etc. on the board, slow down electron pixies travelling at 12V or faster from a power supply into one pair of connectors, to the set voltage speeds scrawled on the board, before they exit from the other pair of connectors on the other side. Those speeds have been measured by elite higher ranked traffic cop demons living in much more expensive and far more accurate measuring gizmos than I can afford. If you shove 12V in one end and don't get the scrawled voltages out, your meter is not accurate. Pixies which refuse to slow down are eaten by demon cops.




I may open my charger up to look. How do I test for a fake fuse inside the charger?




This Grin dude says blade fuses don't always blow, causing problems. Three in series would increase the odds of one blowing:

Do BMS Battery ship from China?

Yes get your point, and yes my battery came from China. But I wasn’t gonna wait ages for a new charger

 

[billyboya]

Well today I went for a short ride. Put battery on charge again. Never touched any leads on charger. And put on a multimeter when it was at 42.4v. The charger light went green automatically. So like you said saneagle my meter is reading a bit high. So now hopefully when meter says 42.4 volts the charger light should go green automatically.

 

[sjpt]

Is there a button an LEDs on the battery to show how charged it is. Green on the charger could mean battery charged, or could mean broken connection between charger and battery.

 

[Cisco-man]

Plugs and fuses was part of an earlier post. I don’t think you can buy anything in the UK with a 13A plug on it, that doesn't have a plug fuse - it might be hidden maybe? Controversially, the plug fuse is there mainly to protect the infrastructure wiring of the house, not the device you are connecting to the mains. Any device protection will either be by additional output fuses on the actual device, or designed-to-fail components within the device. Fuses are for up-stream protection.

 

[chris_n]

The plug illustrated in the post by @billyboya earlier does not contain a fuse, that plug does not comply with UK regs. That is one of the reasons why trading standards condemned the chargers in the next post.
The fuse in the plug is there to protect the cable and device connected to it not the house wiring, that is protected by the consumer unit fuses / MCB's / RCBO's etc.
The reason UK requires fused plugs is to do with the unique way UK wires houses with ring mains. In UK a ring is protected by a 32A fuse / MCB / RCBO and if there is no fuse in the plug that full current can flow through the cable that may be as small as 1mm², the correct size for that current is 4mm².
In Europe the final circuit is a radial circuit protected by a 10A or 16A device so has nowhere near the same potential for such a massive overload, yes it would overload a 1mm² cable but not to the extent that it would melt.

 

[billyboya]

Is there a button an LEDs on the battery to show how charged it is. Green on the charger could mean battery charged, or could mean broken connection between charger and battery.

Yes keep forgetting about that