Trickle charger for 6 volt batteries

The 'wall-wart', standard simple battery chargers, dc source with a resistor, etc. will all 'trickle' a current into the battery as long as connected to power & a battery. If remains connected forever, that battery will be over-charged, out gas, boil away the electrolyte. This is not good. A timer is a step to correct this problem & if you manage to get the time right (exactly in balance with the 'battery idle' internal losses) it is a perfect solution.

Those more expensive FLOAT chargers have regulator circuits in them to act just as the regulator's function with your generator or alternator. It will supply current to the battery when needed & no current when not needed, so as to maintain a fully charged state. Will not over-charge the battery. You recall the often quoted numbers in the alt/gen/reg threads of 14.2 to 14.6v and 7.1 to 7.3v? Those are set to those values because the 'end of charge' voltage for a fully charged lead acid battery is 2.4volts per cell (14.4 and 7.2). A Float charger will cycle current flow on/off as the battery voltage drops below or rises above those values. To really get to the nat's hair of things, the batteries 2.4v per cell voltage varies with temperature & the 'really good' FLOAT chargers even take temperature into account and adjust accordingly.

Finally, despite all this seeming complexity, even the el-cheapo Harbor Tool Float charger that looks like a 'wall-wart' with a another 1/2 'cigarette sized' box mid-way in the cord, has a pretty good regulator inside! You can leave it on forever and on sale regularly for $10. I have no connection with Harbor Tool, except that they do from time to time collect and send some of my hard earned cash to China. And I apologize for that. America, make me one for $10!

Yer chemical battery cares that the charger RED plus (+) clippie connects to the battery PLUS (+) terminal and the charger BLACK minus (-) clippie connects to the battery MINUS (-) terminal.

And NO, you do NOT haffta disconnect enny of yer battery cables from the battery, just klip the charger connections to the correct battery studs. Isn't that simple, eh?..... ...Dell

the chinese charger should work OK as well. ( if it works out of the box! )

soundguy

If a diode did short.. the battery would QUICKLY burn out those hair thin windings in the secondary if there was any juice inthe battery at all.

besides... have you ever opened up a standard plain battery charger/booster from any of the box stores.. if you had, you'd find a transformer, a rectifier or bridge, a switch if it is a dual voltage or dual current model, and a circuit breaker... and that's about it.... prety much the same as the 5$ wall wart.. just more current capacity.

soundguy

soundguy

which one you want to talk about. Most wall warts i see have silicon based diodes.. and rarely.. germanium.

The circuit breaker inthe secondary of a charger circuit can and will open if it's current capacity threshold is breached. if a diode shorted and let an ac wave.. ie reverse current in.. I'm betting there is going to be sufficient current to pop that breaker.. if not.. it's -a -VERY- poor circuit design... The circuit breaker should be sized for the max charge rate on the charger plus a small tolerance... not much more..

soundguy

draw the schematic out.. the DC side is taking the hit.. and that dc side is a straight piece of wire running continously thru the xformer secondary.. ALL series with the circuit breaker.. with the battery as part of the circuit.

soundguy

DC power supplies and chargers are the 2nd most simple circuit there is to build.. with a lamp circuit being the easiest.

I've witnessed plenty of failures of power supply and charger circuits from transformer primary and secondary failures, both in fused / breaker or unprotected circumstances. Worst I have ever seen is some magic smoke escaping after a thermal overload in the xformer.

I'f I'm one brick short.. you are missing the entire building.

Pick someone else to argue with.. Perhaps someone who doesn;'t know electrical theory so you can buffalo them... This isn't nuclear physcs.. it's 58 year old solid state silicon junction diode technology..

soundguy

Jeff

What I do is plug my 12V charger into a 24 hr light timer set to only come on 1 hr per day. After setting unused for 3 months last winter the tractor fired right up (6-cyl Funk with 12V battery). Doing the same thing this winter. Hopefully your charger has a 6V setting?

By the way, if anyone else gets one of those little 'automatic' chargers, make sure that you don't have to punch a button on it to get it to come back on after a power failure.