Charles Industries CI1215A charger repair

TBarCYa

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Apr 13, 2005
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I have a basic schematic for this changer that basically boils this thing down to a transformer and 2 diodes per bank. Given this, I'm debating attempting to repair it myself as I believe that it's not charging my batteries. Has anybody tried repairing one of these and have any insight? I'm not being cheap, I'm a tinkerer so I'd rather take on a challenge than throwing away something that was probably built to be repaired.

Thanks.
 

mike_i

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Jun 28, 2017
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what makes you think it's not charging the batteries? Are you able to measure the voltage and current output while it's theoretically charging?
 

TBarCYa

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I haven't had a chance to test the voltage without the batteries hooked up but I had left the battery switch on both for a few days and came back to dead batteries with only 2 GPS units running. It's a 15 amp charger so if it was working it should have been able to keep up with the GPS.

I'll be testing it tomorrow and I'm hoping to find bad diodes that should be easy to replace
 

TBarCYa

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The batteries are good. I figured out that there's very little output from the charger which likely means that the capacitor is dead so I'll be replacing it
 

mike_i

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little current or voltage output? How did you determine it was the capacitor? If your'e referring to an electrolytic capacitor they do dry up and go bad, you can test it with a multimeter .Good luck let us know how it goes.
 

TBarCYa

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I was only able to check the voltage and saw a 0.1v rise in both batteries when the charger is on vs when it's off. According to the docs, I should see about a 1v increase.

I determined it's the capacitor by eliminating everything else. The diodes show continuity in only one direction and the coil resistance is in spec. And that's all there is to the charger except for the capacitor which is attached to a secondary coil that controls the magnetic field and stabilizes the main transformer output.
 

TBarCYa

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I finally got the charger out of the boat to really dig into it... It definitely looks like it's the capacitor because without the capacitor I get 18v on the output of the transformer and ~18 after the diodes. With the capacitor connected the output is ~150mV. When I put the DMM on the capacitor the resistance climbs slowly (it's a BIG capacitor) to 2.2ohm and stays there rather than continuing to climb to infinity but this could be because the 9v battery in my DVM isn't enough to jump the plates on a 2uF 660v capacitor.

Regardless, I have now tested good output from the transformer and clean DC out of the diodes and the new capacitor should be arriving next week.
 

TBarCYa

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While I'm waiting for the capacitor to arrive I am thinking about what would be involved in modifying my 15A 2 bank charger to a 3 bank charger. I know that I can't increase the amps without changing the transformer but it appears that the rectifiers are both connected to the same output from the transformer so my thought is that I could build a rectifier from two 20A power diodes to provide and isolate the 3rd output. The ground for the batteries comes straight off the transformer which is why I wouldn't use 4 diodes.
 

TBarCYa

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For anyone interested, it did not work to add another output because the output of the diodes was half that of the built-in rectifier indicating that I was only rectifying half of the wave. My next step, should I choose to pursue it, would be to figure out what rectifier the manufacturer used and order one of those... But I'm not sure it's worth the time or effort at this point.
 
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