I have the original S2 9.2 battery charger for two batteries. Do they go bad and how do you know? It charges the batteries but I don't know about performance.
Do battery chargers go bad?
- Thread starter richard965
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take a volt ohms meter and set it on 20 vdc and prob the battery with the charger in the off position and read the meter then turn on the battry charger and prob the battery again and read the meter if the charger is reading higher that your non charged reading then it is working .....but you may want to up grade your charger to a newer one as they have come a long way from the 70's and 80's....
regards
woody
regards
woody
Yes. My ferroresonant charger went bad. We would go out for a few hours and barely be able to start the motor. It charged but not completely, that's about all I know about it"s performance. It also hummed pretty loud. I put in a Charles Marine 20 amp charger tha'ts great, only it's advertised as no rfi or emi interference and it puts out alot of rfi. My stereo and vhf radio can only receive a very few strongest signals when the charger is on. Dissappointing..
Modern day chargers should not do this. (Even ferro resonant chargers shouldn't do it) Modern smart chargers are switching power supplies and usually the switching freq is in the tens of KHz which should not affect radios. It sounds like the charger internal filters are not working possibly indicating a grounding issue as most good internal filters go to an internal ground on the circuit board. Do you have a chassis ground from the charger chassis to ship's ground? Are all the other ground connections (real) good? Batteries make excellent capacitors at RF freqs which also should help with RFI so the connections should be good. Battery charger wiring should not be routed along side other ship's wiring. AC or DC
If the old charger was a ferro resonant charger, it probably would not interfere as I think the only freqs bouncing around would be 60 Hz or 120 Hz assuming a full bridge rectifier and these freqs would be sinusoidal. The newer chargers get rid of the heavy transformer/tickler coil and use switching power supplies which are noisy (square wave) but should be able to be filtered effectively. Also look at wire size for the length of run taking into account positive to negative roundtrip distance and quality of connections. I just today ripped out my ferroresonant and installing a Xantrex 60a TrueCharge along with 4 new GC2C batteries. (Old batteries were literally half dry AND I need a massage) I'm also rewiring all my battery circuits with big wire. Amazing what ya find. Like battery tie down anchors in the bottom of box with batteries sitting on top of them.. Boat is new to me and I'm refitting. If you still have problems try and talk em into an exchange.
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