I’ve got this Ancel BA-101 battery tester for a few years now and discovered an issue testing flooded car batteries. The damn thing reads always low compared to other battery testers. I mean low in the tune of 25 to 30%! AGM’s read comparable within margin of error. I wonder if all these have the same problem or mine is defective somehow?
-
-
25% off is pretty bad, so it's reading 9V when a DMM reads 12V ???!?!
What numbers are we talking about here? -
Voltage is fine, but the SOH (state of health) and capacity is way forking off when I test flooded car batteries. Why I don’t know yet. The measurements of spiral and flat plate AGM’s are o.k. calculating in margin of errors. I verified this by a current draw test this morning as well. If you look that unit has good ratings online.
All it came about was when I tested my 4year old Magnacharge flooded H8 (Group 49) battery that tested replace and a 43% SOH. After taking out the battery, cleaning and delsulfating, I got 70% on this Ancel BA101. Measured this battery on a load tester and I got 95%. Measured it again with a borrowed Topdon 101 (about the same thing than my Ancel) I get 98% SOH.
I trust my load tester, so this makes the Ancel BA-101 lading in the bin.
Comment
-
TBH a lot of these capacity testers are estimates anyway so I don't have much confidence in any of them. What "load tester" are you using? ESR/internal resistance doesn't necessarily accurately measure capacity...Comment
-
The old fashioned manual kind with the heat coil and the analog meter. Between it and my homebrew charger-desulfator and a logging DMM, I can tell you a lot about the SOH. I just found it nice having such a tester, when I scrounge around the junk battery pile to be recycled by me when I need Group 31 batteries.Comment
-
the old big-load type combined with a digital voltmeter is the best way to judge.
load it and see how much it drops.
Comment
-
See that's basically an internal resistance/DC-ESR tester... It's only an indication of whether it can supply current to a starter, but you can't compute exact capacity with that.Comment
-
Here is a trick. If you let the headlights on for 20 mins and then start your car, you got nothing to worry about your battery. We don't need an exact capacity measurement on a battery. It changes all the time due to temperature alone. What is more interesting is the internal resistance of a battery.
Comment
-
Okay so now you're saying the 25-30% error on the Ancel is just fine???
What was the point of this thread now?Comment
-
eccerr0r Nope, didn’t say that. The next problem with the Ancel is that the internal resistance measurement is off too. I use that tester actually not much for checking good batteries, rather for junked ones that I want to restore coming from the junk / return pallet from a commercial outfit. It saves me time, vs me going there with a DMM and or an old fashioned manual current tester. One problem is most of them in that pile are group 31, flooded. Not quite sure how exactly that thing calculates SOC and SOH, but it must have to do with battery voltage, measuring current, internal resistance and selected parameters.
Maybe I’ll open that sucker up some time for shits and giggles.
Comment
-
Well if you said you didn't need an exact capacity measurement, then it totally fits with error as being fine.
I'm sure you will find nothing special, it's totally software to estimate life, probably dv/dt under load estimation of capacity, which is not always accurate.Comment
-
You need to use at least 5-10A pulses to measure ESR on car batteries. But it costs money for a bigger mosfet/resistor thicker test lead wire etc. and Ancel might be a little cheapola there. I don't see any PCB pics for it. It can also have crap firmware that doesn't do good math lol.
What I like about using ESR is it doesn't matter much the state-of-charge. Old fashioned load-tester is, so you can get mixed up - is the battery not fully charged or old or what?
Lead acid batteries usually die from corrosion, plates and grids/interconnects go bad. Or sulphate build up. So ESR goes up.Comment
-
I might help out in the picture department on the Ancel. And yes, it is some cheap @$$ tester. I tried AGM spiral, flat plate, and flooded. All charged up and desulfated. Interesting thing today: I measured a small 350CCA U1 lawn mower battery and that was fine. It seems the problem is with large flooded batteries.
Comment
-
On a second thought: It may be o.k. on small batteries, because the internal resistance is like double from large batteries. So a 0.3 milli Ohm extra does not make much difference.
A good large battery should have something like 2.5 to 3.5 milli Ohm. A U1 or a Group 51R has something like 6.5 to 7.5 milli Ohm.Comment
-
all batteries arent the same .Comment
-
Here are some Ancel BA-101 nudes! Pretty simple made using an STM32 of course. I did check the software version and it is 1.0 on mine. Maybe it's buggy or something. The 5W 10Ohm resistor is within specs.Attached FilesComment
-
-
I’ve seen this too… but I doubt it is causing my problem.Comment
-
how can u4 having a chunk blown out of it not be a problem?
Comment
-
Hello, all.
Cyberpower Battery Backup Unit.
I bought two new ML18-12 batteries through Amazon (They have already refunded my money for the two batteries as we thought the batteries might have been bad.)
When I got them in, they were not fully charged. I connected them to the UPS and waited 24 hours before connecting any networking equipment.
In parallel, they read 24v, but within 24 hours, the meter on the front of the unit dropped from 4 to 3 bars on the battery charge indicator.
Checking the voltage, it was down to 22v.
I quickly removed everything... -
Order my parts from mobilesentrix.com and iPhone batteries have been excellent. Recently got 3x bad A1534 (2015) batteries. All would work until ~30-40+% and drop to < 10% instantly. Typical sign of cheap batteries.
Perhaps the less popular A1534 model's aftermarket batteries are more source limited. Just find it surprising quality from mobilesentrix (usually fairly high quality aftermarket parts) have been so poor.
BTW, this isn't the only defective parts I've had from mobilesentrix. Amongst others including iPad Air touch screen and A1989 touch bar (display was... -
Hi friends of electronics
What you see in the video and pictures attached is the circuit for charging the batteries of a DC motor.
The problem is that this circuit cannot charge the batteries (3 1800mAH NiMH batteries) any more. When the circuit was OK, its green LEDs lit up one at a time to show that the batteries have charged more. But now that the circuit is flawed, LEDs light up as you see in the video and at the same time successive beeps are heard.
Please help me fix this circuit.
(the datasheet of the IC: https://pdf.datasheet.live/28... -
Problem description:
My UPS requires new batteries every ~3 months; in this time frame, an average of about 5 to 10 power flickers or short power interruptions (< 2 minutes) occur. After an average of 3 months, a new pair of batteries begins to fail to keep the UPS up during any flicker or power interruption. The load it powers is a single computer/workstation running 24/7 with a continuous consumption between 200W to 300W.
UPS model:
The Atlantis 1001 is a non-inexpensive (~120€ back then) home/office offline UPS, rated 1000VA, 600W, designed for two 7Ah... -
Here is a website I have ordered from before and the results that they claim are correct from what I have seen from the batteries I have bought from them
BatteryHookUp.com
https://batteryhookup.com/collection...odem-batteries
I have test about 5 battery packs ( out of 15 battery packs I bought) and have had very good results and so far have not found any bad cells
I have also bought these battery packs before on EBay and they are a good source for a battery case that holds 18650 batteries however...
Comment