battery charger question....

[Lou C]

Question, I have an older Schumacher "smart" charger that I have had, about 10 years. Today I was using it to charge one of batteries on the boat, the other battery I was charging with a newer NOCO 10 amp charger. Just out of curiosity I checked the charging voltage of both batteries, the one on the Schumacher was between 16-17 volts (and was reading 12.5 V before I hooked up the charger) whereas the one on the NOCO charger was reading between 13.6-14 Volts. Question, is the old Schumacher charging at too high a level for safety? It does have a voltage read out when it is charging but it never goes as high as what I measured.

 

[tpenfield]

16 volts is a bit high. You don't want to go much over 14 volts to charge.

 

[Lou C]

That's what I thought, I'm not going to use that one anymore. The NOCO seems to charge at a rate safer for the batteries.

 

[mike_i]

Just to confirm, did you use a digital voltmeter to measure the voltage and not depend on a built in meter on the chargers?

 

[Lou C]

Yes I used 2 different digital voltmeters