12-01-2023, 04:35 AM
Some time ago i watched a video from "diagnose Dan", he demonstrated a small battery tester on a car battery, the test took 1 minute and showed the battery which had started the car just fine needed replacement because of declining capacity.
This got me thinking and after finding some interesting posts got one of these LANCOL 200 pro testers.
Our bikes have small batteries and there are not many testers which will do the small sizes and do it in Ampere hours, this one tests down to 3Ah.
It can test for cca, state of charge, state of health in % and most important the internal resistance of the battery.
It can also show the minimum crank voltage during a start cycle.
And how well the charging system works, if there are any diodes who have failed ( ripple in Millivolts )
The tester uses " kelvin clips" which have separate wires on each side of each clip, one set for testing the voltage and applying the test load on the terminal and a second set to accurately measure the internal resistance of the battery in milli ohms, which is a very small value hence the special technique.
More to to follow.
The advantage of this method is to record the values of a new battery and test and record over time the measured values to enable you to verify if the battery is still in good shape.
Since i have several batteries we keep this in a separate log with dates and readings;
A sharp eye can see that a lithium battery has about half the internal resistance of a vrla battery ( cb900 ) which is the reason it starts with much more energy.
By the way the test current is a 1 ampere square wave of 200 hz as measured on my oscilloscope to give you an idea, the instrument measures the internal resistance based on this load.
Here is an example of a failing 30 Ah battery test;
Turns out after getting to know the tester it can predict with some accuracy what the state of the battery under test is and a lot quicker than putting the battery under load and testing the capacity in the old fashioned way.
Hope this helps and in no way trying to sell any of these things, just mentioning the fact that they are available.
This got me thinking and after finding some interesting posts got one of these LANCOL 200 pro testers.
Our bikes have small batteries and there are not many testers which will do the small sizes and do it in Ampere hours, this one tests down to 3Ah.
It can test for cca, state of charge, state of health in % and most important the internal resistance of the battery.
It can also show the minimum crank voltage during a start cycle.
And how well the charging system works, if there are any diodes who have failed ( ripple in Millivolts )
The tester uses " kelvin clips" which have separate wires on each side of each clip, one set for testing the voltage and applying the test load on the terminal and a second set to accurately measure the internal resistance of the battery in milli ohms, which is a very small value hence the special technique.
More to to follow.
The advantage of this method is to record the values of a new battery and test and record over time the measured values to enable you to verify if the battery is still in good shape.
Since i have several batteries we keep this in a separate log with dates and readings;
A sharp eye can see that a lithium battery has about half the internal resistance of a vrla battery ( cb900 ) which is the reason it starts with much more energy.
By the way the test current is a 1 ampere square wave of 200 hz as measured on my oscilloscope to give you an idea, the instrument measures the internal resistance based on this load.
Here is an example of a failing 30 Ah battery test;
Turns out after getting to know the tester it can predict with some accuracy what the state of the battery under test is and a lot quicker than putting the battery under load and testing the capacity in the old fashioned way.
Hope this helps and in no way trying to sell any of these things, just mentioning the fact that they are available.