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Old 03-03-2011 | 08:57 AM
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rctom
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From: Flower Mound (near Dallas), TX
Default RE: A123 battery document


ORIGINAL: rctom



No. To do a balance charge you need both the two wire main lead connected to the ''Output'' leads and the balance lead should be plugged into the little white connector on the charger's side. The little extension is not used for balancing with that charger.

TF
New product available. I have has some harnesses made so that it's possible to do a balance charge (highly recommended) with only a single connection to the battery pack. This makes hooking things up for balancing much simpler. $10 will get you the harness and we will include them with purchase of new charger.

FYI we have found that balancing is important, more than we thought. I used to tell people to balance occasionally, that it was OK to not balance most of the time. I've found that this was not working as well as I had thought it would, and I now recommend doing a balance charge whenever possible.

It still doesn't hurt anything to do a quick unbalanced charge if you need to, but whenever you have the opportunity and time go through a complete charge/balance. Failure to balance repeatedly will result in one cell taking more charge and the other taking less, and this gets worse with each non-balanced recharge. If you balance every time, the balancing phase goes very quickly. If balancing takes a long time (like more than 15-20 minutes) then your pack was probably getting out of balance.

TF