4A Charger for the Mercane 1000W scoot

Given that my scoot has 13.2Ah battery capacity, charging it at 2A seemed ludicrous, especially given that Lithium batteries are well within safe limits at 0.5C charging (and 2A is about 0.15C) and 4Amps will still only be 0.3C.  As well my 2A charger gets rather hot on a hot day (so I wanted to get something with a fan). I got this one from Aliexpress for about $40:

it came "plugless" at the scooter side and so I added a compatible plug (no big deal) for my scooter.

Plugged it in and whop: perfect:

the astute will observe that this photo was taken before the one above because I had not got around to putting insulation on the plug ... heh

Some observations have been made about the noise of the fan, and I can say "its obvious" ... not "Commercial Hair Dryer" but not "Silent Night" either.

Naturally my battery wasn't "dead flat" so I can't provide full charging data, but I can say that normally Lithium follows 2 stages of charging:

1. Constant Current (where the voltage gradually inflates like a baloon)
2. Constant Voltage (where the voltage barely moves, but the final parts of the battery pack "expand" in capacity like blowing up a balloon).

So I thought I'd record the latter part of the charging and compare it to the existing data I recorded using the 2Amp charger the other day.

so basically both the 4A and 2A charger took the same time for the "balance charge" component, 1 hour 50min . The 4A charger makes it plain when its in that phase by not just making a light go green, the fan shuts off too, so it goes very quiet.

So while the 4A charger will bring up the bulk of my pack in half the time, meaning that it will charge to the start of balance charge time in 2 hours instead of 4 hours, the remaining balance stage will still take nearly two hours (for either charger).

This is actually very close to what Battery University report for charging Lithium Ion.

which is charging at 1C (while I'm charging at lesser amounts, like 0.15C on the 2A charger and 0.3C on the 4A charger. Both my results and their results show that the last part of charge takes nearly two hours.

Assuming you are doing a full balance charge (and I would at least every second or third charge) the 4A charger will bring it down a lot but no matter what higher speed charging has its diminishing return points because even with charging at 13Amps it would take 3 hours in total.

Summary:

• 2A charger -> full charge (including balance) time = 6 hours
• 2A-> full charge (no balance, just to green light) time = 4 hours
• 4A charger -> full charge (including balance) time = 4 hours
• 4A charger -> full charge (no balance, just to green light ) time = 2 hours

And of course if you just wanted a quick top up then half an hour will get you twice as much as the 2A charger.

Pretty comfortable that this is money well spent (cos sometimes I just need a quick boost and go out again)