Battery tender pigtail install#

The Battery Tender's Power Tender (5A) looks like what I should have. Then I'd consider replacing the regular 7.5A SAE Tender pigtail with something more studly for true jumpstarting. Wired for heated gear they should work fine for a Tender. I don't know what the sockets themselves are rated for. I got one of the dual powerlet socket kits. I'd guess bump or jump starting puts the charging rate over 5A at some point.

But I have hill to roll down and won't be bump starting the beaST on level ground.ĥA is outside the 10% recommendation Mark mentioned but when ya gotta go ya gotta go. Obviously the state of the battery at that time will affect time-to-starting. My two car battery charges are too bulky to use especially if I'm in something of a hurry. and it just takes too long to bring the battery up. I want something that will revive a reluctant battery should I go out the the bike one day and it doesn't start. My ST has charged that way for at least a decade.Ĭlick to expand.The Battery Tender's Power Tender (5A) looks like what I should have. If it wasn't, things would have become very messy very quickly.Īs long as your Powerlet is on a properly-fused, un-switched circuit and connect it to the right battery charger for the job, charging through it should be no problem. Sounds like the wrong thing in either case, and you were fortunate that the current was enough to blow the fuse. Whatever you connected was either a dead short from the battery's perspective or was able to deliver loads of current and did so until the fuse blew. (I'll be more than happy to help you figure out what that is.) Powerlets are only rated to carry 16A, and unless you've put in very large wire, that fuse isn't going to prevent the socket or the wiring from melting down and possibly starting a fire in the event of a short.

Battery tender pigtail install#

Pull that fuse out of there and don't install another one until you've figured out the right size. The rule of thumb for batteries is that charge current should be limited to about 10% of capacity, so a 14 AH battery should be charged at no more than 1.4A.Ĭlick to expand.First things first: You should not be fusing your Powerlets at 30A. Chargers have to be current-limiting, which means they have circuitry in them that adjusts the voltage to keep the amount of current flowing down to something that isn't going to destroy the battery. This is why you can't use a 12V power supply to charge a battery. (It'll also burp out a lot of very flammable hydrogen gas in the process.) The battery will have lots of current flowing through it, making heat, boiling the electrolyte and doing other damage to the internal parts. If you connect a charger that's capable of delivering 30A, it will have no idea whether the battery can handle that kind of current and will deliver all of it because there's not enough resistance to slow it down.

They have very low internal resistance, enough so that for all intents and purposes, a large battery is a dead short when seen from the outside. If you have a 12-volt power supply and a load that has a resistance of 12Ω, Ohm's law (Current = Voltage / Resistance) says the current will be 1A.īatteries aren't loads.

Current depends on voltage and resistance.