Draper 53491 6V/12V Smart Charger and Battery Maintainer (10A), Black

Product Information

After starting out as an FIA motorsport reporter, I joined the Fast Car team in 2022 and never looked back. It has the ability to activate, analyse and recondition the battery in 10-steps, making it ideal for deep discharged batteries. These hook onto the positive and negative terminals of the battery permanently and are secured with nuts. The materials used in a battery are susceptible to degradation, and user behaviour (among other factors such as weather and age) can affect the life of the battery’s materials. The instructions feel the same, while plugging it in results in a hot electronics smell and a vibration.

feature Best car battery chargers 2023 Advancing technology means motorists need to take better care of their car batteries. Winter is the toughest time of the year for your car’s battery, so having a good battery charger ready to go when a helping hand is needed is a worthwhile precaution. It’s no accident that almost all smart chargers now have conditioning modes that can keep a battery topped up long term. Luckily, we managed to get our hands on a whole bunch of them and decided to put the market’s best car battery chargers through their paces. CTEK pioneered multi-mode charging, which so many rivals have adopted, but with the new 8-Amp CS One it is nowhere to be seen.

Most of our product pages have a link to the warranty procedure for that manufacturer and we encourage you to follow the instructions on these pages which will normally direct you to the manufacturers helpline. Depending on your levels of patience, budget and type of vehicle, the Ring smart charger also comes in 8A and 4A versions, better suited to vans and city cars respectively. Such as a knatty adapter that lets you charge your car’s battery through a cigarette lighter socket. And smart charger essentials present include dedicated Winter, AGM, desulphation/repair, and condition only modes.

And whilst the unit will happily maintenance charge batteries, its unsealed case rules out long-term use on an outdoor car. This means a car with a failing battery, but okay charging system, remains usable until a battery swap is possible. Lockdowns taught us all many things, but for a fair few motorists it was that today’s cars don’t take much more than 4-6 weeks of being laid up to run their batteries completely flat.But age has slightly caught up with the unit: it’s not weatherproofed so should ideally only be used inside, and it doesn’t cope well with really dead batteries. CTEK has been ahead of the game for years, and it still has a few aces to play as the rest of the market catches up.

Under the Consumer Contracts Regulations June 2014 you have a duty to take reasonable care of Products whilst they are in your possession. A booster is only as good as its internal charge, but it’s easy to forget to regularly top up the unit if it’s not being used. When a car isn’t driven, low-power features, such an immobiliser or alarm, continue to draw from the battery since there’s no power being generated by the alternator. These are useful not only for keeping classic cars topped up, but also because modern cars – with their many computer memories and power sapping security systems – drain their batteries in a manner of weeks.The case is IP65 damp sealed, and the LCD display has an intuitive mobile/tablet style charge indicator as well as showing voltage. The Draper 53491 BCI10 is a portable 10A smart charger that does more than just charge 6V and 12V vehicle batteries.

Whilst some steps are simply rudimentary checks, most of the others monitor the battery’s charge level carefully and utilise different voltages to maximise the level of current safely flowing into the battery. Finally, you’ll want to consider the maximum current the charger can support (the higher the current, the faster the charge) and what IP (ingress protection) rating it has. At nearly a foot long, the booster cables allow a bit more positioning flexibility than most rivals, too. Alternatively, select the charger’s power supply mode, keep it hooked up the through the lighter socket, and swapping a battery without losing memory codes becomes effortless. What's more, the conditioning (or maintenance) mode is just one part of a smart charger’s multi-stage cycle.

Configured with “smart” technology, the RSC806 not only reconditions the battery, but also features a cold weather mode for drivers in cooler climes. Battery chargers have been around almost as long as cars have had batteries, yet in the last couple of decades they’ve become significantly smaller, smarter, and dearer. This creates electricity to power the lights, computer units and put charge back into the car battery. We still can’t decide if this, the world’s first cordless, lithium capable, battery charger, is genius or bonkers.