Smart Charger

Smart Charger Information

A smart charger with its automatic charging circuitry will definitely save your battery and you can have confidence that your battery is always charged and ready. While not as common as it once used to be, the potential for an explosion and fire resulting from batteries left in a charger too long still occur. And even if the don’t explode, a battery charger that does not sense the charge status and keeps charging the battery, will eventually boil the battery dry. The result is that you will be buying a new battery. Exploding batteries are certainly not the norm, but a quick search on YouTube will show you that it’s certainly a possibility when an incorrect charger is used for a particular battery or manufacturer instructions aren’t followed regarding the maximum time you should leave a battery in a charger. That’s where a smart charger comes to the rescue.

Increase Safety with a Smart Charger

You can avoid the concerns associated with battery explosions and fires by using a smart charger for all of your battery charging needs. A smart charger knows exactly when to stop charging a battery in terms of both the safety point of view as well as the continuing durability of the battery being charged. Continuing durability is important because constant overheating of a battery will lead to a much short lifespan, which will mean you’ll be replacing batteries much more often.

Extending Battery Life & Saving Money With A Smart Charger

In addition to safety concerns, using a smart charger is essential when you are dealing with a higher quality battery. The smart charger is simply a battery charger that has a computer on board that takes readings from the battery being charged. The computer sends the proper currents and charging voltage to the batter that are necessary for providing a full and complete charge, while not over charging the battery. The better smart chargers on the market today have a built in equalizing charge that will start once the primary charging process has been completed. This equalizing charge actually evens out the charge within the individual battery cells.

There are smart chargers available for just about any battery these days. In many cases, they are included with most electronic devices on the market today. Plug the devices in and forget them. No longer is it necessary to remember to unplug them in x number of hours. In addition to the smart charger that is included with electronic items, there are also smart chargers available for the charging of standard batteries such as AA, AAA, C, D and 9 volt units.

One smart charger that handles AA and AAA batteries exclusively is the Powerex MH-C800S. This particular smart charger is one of the larger ones out there that handles just AA and AAA batteries. The upside here is that if you’ve got a lot of batteries to charge, this charger will handle the job and you won’t have to continually be charging smaller numbers of batteries. When you have a small number of batteries to charge, or you have a combination of NiCAD or NiMH batteries, no worries because this particular charger will handle the job without a problem. Unlike other chargers, you won’t have to worry about what battery gets loaded in what position because it makes no difference.

In addition, this smart charger pulse charges the batteries. This is a big deal because this process actually improves the batteries total charge capacity – both in mAh and voltage. This capacity remains, even if you switch to a different charger at a later time.

The Powerex MH-C800S has three different charging modes. Rapid, which takes 1 to 2 hours for a full charge, Soft, which takes 2-4 hours for a full charge and Conditioning, which takes up to 16 hours for a full charge. While the rapid mode is the default setting on the charger, it’s easy to switch to the other two modes, if desired. In my opinion, the soft charge is the way to go as it easier on the batteries and will likely extend their life. When a battery starts to show signs of not maintaining a charge as long as it should, you’d want to use the conditioning mode.

The Powerex MH-C800S smart charger is highly rated and for good reason – it does a great job and has the capacity for large or small jobs. The lowest price on the Powerex Mh-C800S we can find is here.