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A battery charger is one of the most important car accessories. Selecting the most appropriate battery charger is essential for maintaining your car battery in a good condition for a long time. Some battery chargers are specific to car batteries and the use of an inappropriate battery charger could prove to be extremely detrimental, resulting in high car repair costs.

Choosing the Right Car Battery Charger

The choice of a battery charger should take into consideration the following factors:

• Supervised / unsupervised charging: You can opt to charge your car battery through a manual charger. However, there is risk of batteries overcharging. To avoid this situation, you can opt for an automatic battery charger. The automatic charger keeps track of temperature and charge conditions of a battery continuously and adjusts charge speeds based on the charge condition. Alternatively, you can select manual batter charger with LED indicators. With this type of charger, you can set the battery charging rate.

• Battery type: Chargers must conform to the type of battery used in your car. Your car may be fitted with wet or sealed lead acid batteries. Sealed batteries are also called SLI/RLA/GEL/AGM or simply maintenance free. The use of wet battery chargers on sealed batteries can damage the battery.

• Voltage: Battery chargers are voltage specific. Thus, while choosing a battery charger it is important to ensure that the charger voltage conforms to the actual voltage requirement of your battery.

• Size: Every battery needs a specific amount of current to get completely charged. The required charging current or battery current is stated in C-Rate, where C stands for the battery capacity expressed in amp hours. For example, a 100Ah battery has a “C-Rate” of 100 amps. Thus, to fully recharge a 12V 100Ah battery using a 12V/10A charger will take 10 hours if the battery is fully discharged.

Car Accessories

Thinking of charging your car battery? Here are some car accessories you may need:

• Plastic battery fillers are among the simplest, yet most useful, car accessories. They ensure that you always have a supply of distilled water when you need to top-up your wet car batteries.

• Battery and alternator testers help you verify the condition of your car battery and alternator.