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Product Details
The Battery Tender Plus is a 12 volt @ 1.25 amp battery charger designed to
fully charge a battery and maintain it at proper storage voltage without the
damaging effects caused by trickle chargers. Included is a quick connect
harness for hard to reach areas.
NEW DIAGNOSTICS! Red & Green Lights Alternately Flash for Reverse Polarity
or when the battery is sulfated or if the battery terminals are corroded.
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Temperature compensated to ensure optimum charge voltage according to ambient temperature.
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Automatically switches from full charge to float charging mode.
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Battery Tender at 1.25 amps will charge as fast or faster than any 3 amp charger available.
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Reverse Polarity Protection to ensure user safety. Red & Green Lights Alternately Flash in this condition.
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Complete 4-step charging program (Initialization, Bulk Charge, Absorption Mode, Float Mode).
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10 year Warranty!
You will never have a dead or weak battery because
your car was sitting too long!
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It's so EASY! The connector cord and female
connector head simply connect to your battery and stay connected. Plug it
in to the charger connector and keep it plugged in for a constant trickle
charge. It will only come on when your battery starts to get low. When not
in use it simply tuck the connector cord (yellow Arrow) up inside the engine
compartment. Start your car and drive away. You never have to open
the hood.
1. How can I tell if my
battery is charged or not?
Lead acid batteries are made up of cells. Each cell is approximately 2
volts, so a 12-volt battery has 6 individual cells. It turns out that a
fully charged 2-volt cell has a voltage of approximately 2.15 volts. Oddly
enough, a fully discharged 2-volt cell has a voltage of 1.9 volts. That’s
only a difference of 0.25 volts on each cell from fully charged to fully
discharged. So a 12-volt battery will measure at about 12.9 volts when it’s
fully charged and about 11.4 volts when it is fully discharged. That’s a
total of 1.5 volts that represents the full range of charge on a 12-volt
battery. To make a good guess at how much charge your battery has left, you
can assign a percentage of charge remaining that is directly proportional to
the battery voltage. Let’s see how we can do that. If the battery voltage is
12.15 volts, how much charge is left? Beginning with 11.4 volts representing
no charge or 0% charge available, subtract 11.4 volts from the voltage that
you read. So 12.15 – 11.4 = 0.75 volts. Since there are only 1.5 volts above
11.4 volts that represents the full range of charge, we can divide the
difference that we just calculated by 1.5 volts to get the percentage of
charge remaining. 0.75 volts / 1.5 volts = 0.5 or when expressed as a
percentage, multiply by 100 and get 50%. Here’s the procedure written as a
formula that is applicable to 12 Volt Batteries:
OPEN CIRCUIT BATTERY STATE OF CHARGE CALCULATION
% Charge = SOC
% Charge = ((Measured Battery Voltage – 11.4 volts) / 1.5 volts) x 100
Equation 1
That seems easy enough. So what’s the catch? In order for this formula to
work, the battery must be in a rest state. In other words, the battery
should not be supplying power to any type of load. The experts say that the
battery should remain at rest for at least 24 hours to get an accurate
measurement, but in a pinch a couple of hours are good enough to make a
reasonable guess. Even if the battery is connected to a load, as long as the
load current is less than 1% of the battery capacity in amp-hours, then this
method is probably good enough in most cases. It’s all a matter of how
accurate you want to be. If you’re a scientist or engineer trying to develop
a battery powered product, then you probably want a more accurate
measurement than if you’re going fishing for the weekend and you just want
to know if you need to take the time to charge your battery before you use
it. There is one more thing to keep in mind. The only way to be absolutely
sure that your battery is fully charged is to do a load test. It is best to
have the battery dealer do this for you. We only mention it here because it
is possible for a battery to indicate a good voltage, but then immediately
when you try to use it, it acts like it’s dead. This doesn’t happen very
often, but it’s good to know that it is a possibility.
2. How long will it
take to charge a battery?
We can make a pretty good guess by just dividing two numbers:
Approximate Recharge Time Calculations
(Battery Capacity) / (Charger Current) = Hours
(Amp-Hours) / (Amps) = Hours
Equation 2
Suppose I have a 50 Amp-Hour battery. That’s a fairly typical size for an
automotive engine start type battery. Now let’s say I have a 10 Amp charger.
(50 Amp-Hours) divided by (10 Amps) = 5 Hours. So we would estimate that it
will take a good 10 Amp charger about 5 Hours to recharge a 50 Amp-Hour
battery. Actually this rough estimate usually tells us how long it takes to
recharge the battery to about 80% of its capacity. To complete the recharge
of a battery to 100% with a 3-step charger, it turns out that it will
probably take an equal amount of time, or another 5 hours to recharge the
last 20% of the battery capacity. To complete the recharge of a battery to
100% with a 4 step charger, in most cases it will take less time than with a
3 Step Charger to recharge the last 20% of the battery capacity. These times
are different for all of the software versions.
The Battery Tender Device employs a higher level of sophistication in its use of electronic control to maintain a battery in a full state of charge over extended periods of time. The Battery PLUS Tender Device employs a charge control method to keep the battery at full charge while minimizing the long-term risk of overcharge and premature capacity loss. Trickle chargers are simply not capable of regulating the output voltage applied to a battery as the battery ages, or if a different battery with different characteristics is connected to the trickle charger’s output terminals. The Battery Tender PLUS Device is capable of charge maintenance on all lead acid battery types, including both AGM and GEL cells.
The Battery Tender PLUS Device employs a higher level of sophistication in its use of electronic control to maintain a battery in a full state of charge over extended periods of time. The Battery Tender PLUS Device employs a charge control method to keep the battery at full charge while minimizing the long-term risk of overcharge and premature capacity loss. Trickle chargers are simply not capable of regulating the output voltage applied to a battery as the battery ages, or if a different battery with different characteristics is connected to the trickle charger’s output terminals. The Battery Tender PLUS Device is capable of charge maintenance on all lead acid battery types, including both AGM and GEL cells.
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