Trying to charge car battery, but with a Chinese charger and I don't know what the heck is going on!

Maintenance/Repairs
1

I have a quick charger used to supplement the charging of inverter batteries used to run my home here in Nepal, and my car battery died so I decided to try and charge the battery using that. But everything is in Chinese and I don’t know if I am about to charge the battery or blow up the house. Please help!!! See below for the charger in question…

2

Here are a few more details. Basically, I don’t know if the pot on the charger is for Amps or Volts, and I suspect Amps. Is 12 Amps too much, if so?

3

I can’t read chinese. But the 12 volt light is on, and if the 11.99 is volts, the battery is not charging, it takes at least 13 volts. A guess (and that’s all it is) is you are charging the battery with 12 amps.

What happens when you turn the knob?

12 amps is a good number, if that’s what it is, for a fast charge. If you are in no hurry, I’d taper it back to 5 amps. That is a 35 amp hour battery, so 12 amps will charge it in about 3 hours. 5 amps in 7 hours.

Above numbers are theoretical, they do not account for the remaining charge, or for thermal losses.

4

Just curious, why do you think anyone that posts here can read Chinese?

5

Mustangman – because the people in this group know, collectively, about all things concerning automobiles … and everything else, too. :>)

I’ve been trying to figure out what the two red lights “12V” and “24V” mean. Does the charger automatically sense the battery voltage and decide at what voltage to charge? Could the knob and the meter actually be for setting the current limit? That seems kind of fancy, but so does a digital meter for a battery charger.

OP – Are the house batteries 24V? Does the charger’s 24V light come on when you charge them?

6

Buy a voltmeter and keep the battery close to 14.5V while charging and you should be OK.

7

Why not just go and buy a battery charger.

Yosemite

8
Why not just go and buy a battery charger.

Now that would be way too easy.

9

@herojig
Maybe the following will help.

The left most Chinese characters (arranged vertically above the “A”) mean Ammeter (which is consistent with the “A”).
The knob on the right has characters meaning “weak” is ccw and “strong” is cw (which is consistent with turning to the right to increase output and turning to the left to decrease).
The little lights on the lower seem to show a green “working” state and 12V and 24V options.

None of this means that I know that it can charge your battery. Be safe, and good luck!

10

I would think that someone …a neighbor would be able to translate this for you.

Yosemite

11

For fun I submitted the picture to Google’s language tools, asked it to translate the picture from Chinese to English, and got:

(HTTP: // Chengdu 8 0 44 ah no objection 10065 from 15 -24 461 391 issued 20 Oh no 7,336,331 of 5,789,078 Avatar 53. 23. Day dinner 1.rack CDN.com/car talk.vanilla forums.com/file upload / 8 oh / EF7991 limit of 90 rounds 8 hungry 1 772 992 338 4 does not amount .jpg)

12

The way battery chargers work, one can choose the voltage they produce, the current is a consequence of the load the battery presents, in other words one doesn’t get to choose the current, only the voltage.

It may have a 12/24 volt switch on its side.

13

@RandomTroll . I think that is just the link to this post.

I don’t think that when they made that charger that they would have included any info on the front about "Car Talk.

But that dinner part made me hungry!!!

Yosemite

14

The battery charger I have allows me to set the output AMPs.

http://www.auto-repair-manuals.com/Associated-6009-Battery-Charger-Automotive-6-and-12-Volt.html

I can even select enough output AMPs to start an engine.

Tester

15

Thx all for your response! Well, come to find out by using the thing, it is an autosensing quick charger (6, 12, 24) and the display is indeed in Amps. Left the battery overnight and as the battery charged, the amp indicator went from 12 to near zero. So it must lower the amps automatically as well. So, all is well and thx again for all your support; shout out to RandomTroll for the not-so-accurate translation of chinese :slight_smile:

16

Also, to answer all the other posts here: Nope, can’t buy anything cool like a portable car battery charger like you have in the west, what I got is what’s on the market - for $30 USD. We have to use them on the bigger deep-cycle solar-system batteries shown in the pic, as both the sun and city line power are often not enough to keep those monsters charged. We run everything on batteries here, sometimes up to 18 hours a day. But back to the device, the pot on the right is to crank up the amps - goes up to about 20 for a 12V bat. So glad the solar tech installed it years ago… no one in my hood has jumper cables :slight_smile:

17

Greetings, welcome to Car Talk. Glad you got good results with your charger. One practical bit of advice when doing stuff like this where you aren’t entirely sure the equipment is compatible with what you want done:

  • Remove the battery from the car first so if it catches on fire it won’t catch the car on fire too,

  • And so it doesn’t damage the car’s alternator.

  • Finally, always wear safety glasses when handling and working with car batteries. Best of luck.

18

I suppose that it’s hard to get those rickshaws to give you a jump.

And you never really know which of the ears of a yak are positive and negative.

Yosemite

19

I thought everyone knew that the right ear of a yak is + & the left is - . Don’t know if that’s from being viewed from astride or facing the yak though . Dang , off to google .

20

I don’t know about yak polarity but true story: on an Enfield ride to Lhasa I had to use the wire entwined on a yak bell collar to repair my bike’s electrical system. 10 years later that wire is still in use.