Car Battery Charger, 12V/24V 20A 20Amp Heavy Duty Battery Charger, Ideal for Various Vehicle Cars Vans Tractors Lead-acid Batteries

This is an "Old School" type battery charger with a proper heavy duty transformer and a meaty bridge rectifier. That is all that is needed or necessary to charge lead acid batteries. I don't want fancy LCD's or blinking LED's on a flimsy printed circuit board. Just a box containing a decent transformer, a rectifier and an analogue ammeter with a needle - that is all that is necessary in a battery charger. This is the second of this model battery charger I've bought for topping-up my 24 volt off-grid battery bank when the household solar panels are giving a good surplus supply of electricity. The batteries are normally charged by a wind generator and then supplemented by these battery chargers when there is a surplus from the solar panels. We use the inverter for heavy power such as washing machine, dishwasher, tumble drier etc. and we now are saving money on electricity bills every month! This charger gives up to 20 amps at 12 volts and up to10 amps at 24 volts. With two of these paired I can often get a 20 amp charging rate into the 24 volt battery bank. That's just under 500 Watts. My only complaint with both chargers, is that the transformers overheated when the charge rate was heavy. i.e. when the inverter is pulling from the batteries AND from the battery chargers. This resulted in the built in thermal cut-out inside the transformer switching off each charger until it cooled. This is a safety feature to prevent overheating. I solved this by cutting a suitable hole in the side of each casing and fitting a 120mm x 120mm brushless mains powered cooling fan to each. (£9.02 per fan on Amazon) (looks similar to a computer fan). The fan is powered from the mains supply inside the charger This has completely cured the overheating problem and I can now drive both battery chargers very hard without them ever overheating and cutting out. THIS is the type of battery charger everybody should use. It punches out a serious amount of amps - especially at 12 volts. A car with a flat battery could be running again in 15 to 30 minutes thanks to one of these. Most of the digital stuff struggles to supply 4 or 5 amps at most. There is very little to go wrong with this type of battery charger - and if it does go wrong it's VERY easily fixed. I also have a very old NON-Digital 12 volt 8 amp battery charger which suddenly failed. For about £5.00 I replaced the bridge rectifier in about 15 minutes. Its as good as new again. You can't easily repair all the digital rubbish. They don't WANT you to repair their rubbish. Plus they stick on all sorts of bells and whistles which 99% of the time you don't need and are often the cause of product failure anyway. These battery chargers are robust, simple and perfect! - a bit like me, I suppose! Thanks for reading this far. P.S. Having now read a few other reviews here perhaps I should point out that the output of ANY battery charger is variable and depends on the load it is charging. In my case, when my 2 x 12volt, 235 amp hour batteries (total of 470 amp hours @24 volts) are nearly full the two chargers only put out a few amps. However, once the inverter kicks in to run an appliance, the output is considerably more - hence the need for the cooling fans when driving it hard. If a battery is flat or almost flat it will take a little while for the current flow to build up and for the battery to begin taking a charge. As the battery approaches full capacity the charge rate (amps) steadily diminishes. Don't simply switch on the charger (ANY charger!) and expect the ammeter to indicate maximum supply! It won't! Also, if your battery is charged so quickly that it gets more than slightly warm, you are very likely to damage it irreparably. Battery chargers have been around for over a hundred years. It's only in the past few years that the 'digital' stuff has been available. This 'Old School', 'Old technology' is simple, tried, tested and proven to work. End.

A good old fashioned battery charger simple to use for a generation used to the on and off button era would highly recommend Diane

Only criticism is that the crocodile clips are poor quality. It works well; I just recharged a completely flat cat battery.

Great value does the job just as good and quick as those others claiming to be twice as quick i’m double the price

The charger does not work. I’ve tried it on two separate batteries, and on both occasions it made a fizzing noise followed by a burning smell, before cutting out completely. I’ve never experienced a battery charger behaving like this.

Ordered item on sunday, it arrived monday...Good delivery service. I had a battery that had sat for over a year without use, I measured the battery voltage prior to charging and the reading was 3.7v. I then put the battery on charge, at first I was a little surprised as intially nothing seemed to be happening, a feature with this charger is that there is no light or reading other than the display needle on the charger and this was sitting at 0. I was disheartend and feared the battery was no good, this was annoying as I had only just bought the battery prior to becoming poorly with covid (start 2021). So in reality the battery had sat for over a year and that will explain the low voltage readout. Anyway, I decided to leave the battery on charge and went to bed. So I started charging around 2pm and left on charge until the next day. I got around 5am and went in to check if there was any progress, fully expecting the battery to be dead. To my surprise I could hear a fizzing coming from the battery, (the fluid inside) I removed the charger cables and applied my multimeter to the battery. This time the reading was 13.4v, I sat there for a while with the multi meter attached and waited for the voltage to stablize, as it was dropping from the initial reading, after 15 minutes I checked it again and the voltage was steady at 12.8v. I then took the once dead battery to my vehicle and fitted it, the car which had sat dorment for well over a year sprung into to life with the first turn of the key. I was happy, this charger quite literally bought my battery back from the dead (3.7v) and fully recharged it within 24 hours (2pm-5am around 15 hours). Although there is no bells and whistles on this charger and the user could really do with a multimeter to check for output, it does exactly what it is supposed to do. Therefore I have no hesitation in giving this product a 5 star review, as it is not a bad unit for the price and will certainly help anyone who has a drained battery, plus it does exactly what it says. I hope this review is useful for anyone looking for a car battery charger. Car battery charged was from a ford fiesta 1.4 ( 47ah 440a Halfords )

Great battery charger, charges fast

Trying to work out how to contact support. Unfortunately I left it in the box until 1 day after the Amazon returns policy. The charger doesn’t seem to have any power into it. I’ve checked the fuse and that looks good. Only the fused push button does not really do anything. It’s loose to pull/push/turn. Can only think it’s faulty but how do I contact support? Thanks Jon