Car Battery Chargers

Car battery chargers are created in all shapes and sizes from tiny trickle-chargers which can plug into your car's cigarette lighter socket, to auto-shop sized monsters that can force enough power into a seemingly-dead car battery to get your vehicle started again quickly.

Some car battery chargers are cheap and simple. They charge your car battery at a very tiny rate of charge, usually less than one Ampere, so there is almost no chance of ever over-charging your car's battery.

However, these small trickle chargers take several hours to charge up a flat battery to where it can start up your car's engine. That is fine if you plan on letting it charge your car's battery all night, while you will be asleep.

But it's not much use to you when you're trying to get the car out of the garage to get to work. For that you need a car battery charger that can pump an electrical charge into your flat battery at ten or twenty times the speed.

You want a battery charger that can boost your car battery at 10 Amps, 100 Amps or even more. But since it is very easy to overheat the battery, boiling its electrolyte and damaging its lead and zinc plates, you need a battery charger that can sense what is going on inside that bettery and adjust the charging rate to the maximum rate which still protects the battery from harm.

Working out the exact charging rate for a flat battery used to be pretty much of a hit or miss affair. Even the auto shop mechanic would, often as not, turn up the charging rate (the Amperage) or his giant-sized charger to 200 or 500 Amps and let the charger force feed your car battery for some minutes up to an hour while he worked on other things.

These guys were pretty experienced at boosting their customers' car batteries, but there is no doubt that these super-powerful quick charges often damaged those batteries as well. The owner wouldn't know about it, and when their battery died later on... well, who was to say whether its life had been shortened or not! The car owner would just have to go buy a replacement battery.