Battery Chargers

[Alan1986]

Hi,

Went to start the car this morning and battery was flat, been off work all week and hardly used it,
Company covered AA on the way to look at it,

Anyways any recommendations for a battery charger?
One that I could use for the car and a bike when I eventually get one,

Flat battery may be common for me on a bike as I'll be riding for pleasure really, not looking at spending too much, but a decent charger has been on my list of things to get for a while,
I can see flat batteries maybe becoming a common thing for me with a bike due to not much usage during winter months
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Cbt Done, Currently wobbling around on a Cbf125 and love it
DAS some time soon

[arry]

Most will recommend CTEK or the Aldi / Lidl deal of the day. Personally I've seen an expensive CTEK one fail and take the battery with it, and read a few reports of the supermarket copies being dead on arrival etc

I went for an Optimate 4 and it's been solid. Got 2 battery connector leads for it and one goes on the car, one on the bike. Plug and play, easy.

Search around and you can get them for under £50 - I know the supermarket ones are under half that, but how often do you really buy a battery charger? Once every 15 years? It's not a lot of extra money to pay out.

[bamt]

I use a CTEK MXS 5 for this; cars and bikes have different sized batteries (physically as well as capacity), and as such a bike typically needs a lower charge rate to be able to cope without damage. Whilst using a basic car one on a bike may cause it to boil over and fail, using a basic bike one on a car will work - but take ages.

The CTEK 5 isn't as fast as a dedicated car charger, but at 5A on the car programme it does better than (say) an Optimate 4 with it's 0.8A maximum. It defaults to motorbike mode on powerup so you don't accidentally fry your battery.

Just as an example, my bike battery is 12Ah, my car is 95Ah. A 1A charger would take 4 days to charge my car fully (though obviously you normally only need to get enough charge in to start it), or half a day to do the bike.

[Alan1986]

[Ichy]

I use a ctek on the car and an optimate on the bike. I would be concerned of drying the battery out on the bike if I used a bigger charger.
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https://www.metacafe.com/watch/1972097/how_to_behave_on_a_forum/

[bamt]

[Ichy]

[Alan1986]