Acquired a powered wheelchair with charger. The charger seems to signal two charged conditions: "Bulk charge complete", and "Charge complete". Charging seems to progress from the former to the latter. What's the significance of bulk charge?
Sounds like 90 % versus 100% or so......
The "bulk charge" is a high current charge to bring the battery back from low levels, the the "charge complete" should occur after the battery has had a higher voltage (than the bulk) applied to finish the charging and enter "float" or terminate the process. There are many and varied applications of that process.
Cheers ......... Rheilly P
Thanks for that. Seems to me that this complex charging method would make sense if it incorporated some kind of monitoring of the battery condition as it progressed. But I disconnected the charger after the "Bulk charge complete" indicator showed (after about four hours of charging), and then re-connected later thinking the cycle would continue from there to the "Charge complete" condition. It didn't. It started all over, indicating "Bulk charge...." after another four hours, or so, suggesting that the charger was quite dumb and had assumed the battery was flat (which it certainly wasn't). Anyway, maybe I'm the dumb one and missing something.
Do a search on 3 stage or 4 stage chargers.
In summary:
Bulk charge is typically a high constant current charge until the battery reaches the cyclic voltage. Absorption charge is holding the voltage at the cyclic voltage until the current falls to a low level. Finally the voltage is dropped back to the float voltage where it can be held indefinately.
Putting battery back onto a charger if it is not fully charged usually will start a bulk charge cycle until the cycliv voltage once again is reached.
OK. Understood. Thanks
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.