Wednesday, December 14, 2022

A new LiFePO4 charger

I'm in love with LiFePO4 batteries. They are lightweight, powerful, and last forever (if you count 2000+ cycles forever). I have a several that I use with various radios and other projects.

What I don't have is several chargers. The charges tend to be very expensive, especially ones with higher amperage. The first one I received as part of a deal when I bought by first battery. Since then, I've looked for cheaper chargers with little success.

I recently found one on Amazon that was around $20 and sometimes even had a coupon. I ordered and, so far, am pleased with it. It's only 3-amps so I'm not going to be charging my larger batteries with it, but it seems to work very well with my 6 and 10-amp batteries.

LiFePO4 Battery Charger

All my equipment has Anderson Powerpoles installed (a ham radio and emergency radio standard), so, as you can se in the pictures, I clipped off the RC connector and installed powerpoles. This way, it mates easily to all my batteries and my power boxes.

I hook it up to a 6-amp battery along with a power monitor and watched it top off the battery. Once it got to 14.7V, the charger ramped down the power and turned itself off. We'll use it over the coming weeks and see how it fares.