Lithium mains charger .

Mr and Mrs Tupcox

Mr and Mrs Tupcox

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Just finishing my lithium battery insulation by adding a fogstar 40amp mains charger on my autotrail comanche with ec500 sargent.
My question.
Insulation of new charger easy, red and black to battery plug in to a 240 socket in van.
Do I need to switch the built in sargent charge off.
But that would stop the eg battery from being charged while on hook up.
 
Mr and Mrs Tupcox said:
Just finishing my lithium battery insulation by adding a fogstar 40amp mains charger on my autotrail comanche with ec500 sargent.
My question.
Insulation of new charger easy, red and black to battery plug in to a 240 socket in van.
Do I need to switch the built in sargent charge off.
But that would stop the eg battery from being charged while on hook up.
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I wouldn't have thought you would need to switch your sargent unit off .
 
Try it and see if it drops current on the new charger. I run two chargers and instead of each running at 30A they will quickly drop. They are taking the voltage of the other charger as battery voltage and throttling back. It’s not too bad as I am still usually getting over 40A going in but annoying not to get the 60 all the time. Mine are Victron chargers though, yours may work differently.

When I changed to my Victron chargers I just unplugged the 240 into my EBL, only thing it turned off was the charger. I know some controllers you can pull a fuse for the onboard charger though as well or rather instead of
 
A good lithium charger will be monitoring the battery voltage so that it knows when to turn off or switch over to a maintenance charge. If you have another charger working alongside it I would have thought it would interfere with this function.
 
nabsim said:
Try it and see if it drops current on the new charger. I run two chargers and instead of each running at 30A they will quickly drop. They are taking the voltage of the other charger as battery voltage and throttling back. It’s not too bad as I am still usually getting over 40A going in but annoying not to get the 60 all the time. Mine are Victron chargers though, yours may work differently.

When I changed to my Victron chargers I just unplugged the 240 into my EBL, only thing it turned off was the charger. I know some controllers you can pull a fuse for the onboard charger though as well or rather instead of
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Schaudt make it supereasy to disable the AC Charger. Same with the on-board DC-DC charger .. disable by pulling a single fuse.
The Sargent ECs usually have a big switch to turn off the AC charger which is handy. Not possible to pull the plug and the AC circuit and the DC outlet both have shared breakers/fuses so stuck in that respect. Switch was very handy.
 
Our ec500 has a red push button switch, to turn off 240 smart charging off .so think I'll try it left on see what happens.
But there is easy option to turn it off..
 
Okta said:
Not sure 2 smart chargers set up with different profiles for different battery types will work well in parallel. I would be concerned about over or under charging the battery.
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In my experience they don’t overcharge, worse case you don’t get full amps from either charger. That’s only my experience in my van with 2 x Victron chargers though.
 
Case proved the sargent ec500 doesn't like its built in charger switched on as well as the new lithium charger .shows error fault ..and had to re-boot..
 
More fun and games the new charger has to be returned to fogstar .as its faulty not been updated our something. Gets up 35amps then switches off then on again gets 35 amps and off it goes..

Also these have a very load fan motor which works continuously...
 
Mr and Mrs Tupcox said:
Great service from fogstar on returning products ,
Picked up by courier this morning phoned then told collected ..New one dispatched ..
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what about the noise from the fan? a lot of cheap chargers have noisy fans and are just not suitable for running in a motorhome for that reason. I've replace 100% operational chargers for customers as they could not put up with the noise.
 
wildebus said:
what about the noise from the fan? a lot of cheap chargers have noisy fans and are just not suitable for running in a motorhome for that reason. I've replace 100% operational chargers for customers as they could not put up with the noise.
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I'll see how we get on with it .it's designed for there batteries. But if not any good ill look for a better one...
 
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