davepl

I have a larger 7002 CTek, and it's cooked a couple of batteries on me now. Must be overcharging them, but it is NOT on the snowflake setting, I checked. I'm going to toss the charger because it's long since out of warranty, but I was wondering if I could test it first... like should it be putting out 13v on a charged battery, or what level of charge is "normal" for a fully charged battery?

BTW, although not very robust (I go through a fair number of them it seems) I'm a big fan of the CTek and this is the first time one has done this... and I probably have 8 of them. They have been great and exhanged them under warranty before, but this one is 10 years old and doesn't owe me anything. It's more about -knowing- for sure if it's the charger or the battery.

laserdude2215

I just checked mine. The spec for the "Maintenance charging - float" mode is 13.6 volts. Mine measured 13.5 volts.

charliebrown266

I have had no problems with mine, i have mine set storage mode!

laserdude2215

What is storage mode and how do you set it? Mine just has standby, normal, snowflake, supply, and recondition.

Purple92

Yep - measure voltage with it connected to the battery.

I'm not sure about the older C-Tek's - but on the newer ones - there are two modes the charger goes into after the battery is fully charged - the first is called "Float Mode" - this provides up to 0.8A @ 13.5 volts and is on for 10 days after the battery is fully charged - after the 10 days the C-Tek switches to what they call a "Pulse mode" - where the charger monitors battery voltage - and "provides a pulse when necessary". So - you may need to wait some time before you get the measurement you really want.

It seems that batteries in infrequently used vehicles are just not lasting as long as they used to. Not sure how widespread this is - but just looking here on the forum - there seem to be a lot of people who post about replacing two year batteries.

Vegas1500