question

petercollins999 avatar image
petercollins999 asked

12/24 Smart charger not charging properly

I have a Orion-Tr Smart 12/24-10 DC/DC charger. I am using it in my motor home to charge my wife's 24V wheelchair (it has 2 12v sealed lead/acid batteries in series). The problem is the charger moves through the charging stages too fast and as a result the wheel chair is never fully charged. It stays in the bulk stage for less than 5 mins and the absorption stage for 30-60mins even when the wheelchair batteries are well discharged. (I would expect the bulk stage to be several hours based on how it works with the wheelchair mains charger). I have played extensively with all the charging settings including all the default settings and tried the custom settings supplied by the wheelchair supplier and the problem persists. Any suggestions? Is this likely to be a settings issue and if so can anyone point me at the correct settings or do you think I have a hardware problem or something else?

charger
2 |3000
Toggle Comment visibility. Current Visibility: Viewable by all users

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 190.8 MiB each and 286.6 MiB total.

2 Answers
wkirby avatar image
wkirby answered ·

What is your Absorb Voltage set to and when the charger moves to Absorb does it display this as the currently measured Voltage too.
Can you actually see any charging current going into the battery when it is in Bulk or Absorb? An amount of current should be showing in the App.

If it reaches its set Absorb Voltage, but the battery charge current is 0A or it is minimal, then perhaps the charger is not actually connected to the battery at all or there is a bad connection between the charger and the batteries.

A short Bulk phase means that the charger is reaching its Absorb Voltage quickly which usually points to bad batteries or a bad connection to them. The batteries are probably fine if the mains charger works fine.

2 |3000
Toggle Comment visibility. Current Visibility: Viewable by all users

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 190.8 MiB each and 286.6 MiB total.

petercollins999 avatar image
petercollins999 answered ·

Many thanks for the reply. The Absorb voltage is set at 28.8V and it is the measured voltage as well. My app does not seem to show the charge going into the battery but my van systems suggest that in Absorb stage it is putting in about 8amps. Clearly some charge is going into the wheelchair batteries because it takes some charge it just does not get fully charged. Any further thoughts?

1 comment
2 |3000
Toggle Comment visibility. Current Visibility: Viewable by all users

Up to 8 attachments (including images) can be used with a maximum of 190.8 MiB each and 286.6 MiB total.

wkirby avatar image wkirby ♦♦ commented ·
If it is showing the Absorb Voltage that means that the charger has reached it's target Voltage of 28.8V and so it rightly goes to Absorb.

Since it is doing this very quickly and no battery current is observed then I strongly suspect a bad connection between the charger and the wheelchair battery or an open fuse / circuit breaker along the way.
If it is taking some charge then a bad connection would also result in the same symptoms.

0 Likes 0 ·

Related Resources

Chargers.

Additional resources still need to be added for this topic