Primative. What you really want is a BA101. HF sells a Viking digital but they want 40 bucks for it. The one above can be bought for 20 bucks on sale at the big online retailer who has Prime. It will do the battery test and give you a life expectancy reading. It will do a cranking test. It will do a charging test. It will also store the data and you can print it out as well. After one use you'll throw the old dinosaur in the trash.
I could be wrong but I have always thought that a fully charged 12 volt battery should test at 13 volts or slightly more. If it shows only 12 it is in need of more charging . This is why wipers, lights and maybe other components might work but the battery isn't strong enough to start the vehicle.
Total piece of friggin crap! I bought the sc1231 and after a year you try to turn it on, with a very low battery and it won't even start charging. I have an ancient large schumacher wheel around charger that has been beat to hell and back, has lasted forever (over 20 years) and still works fine, but I wanted one that was easily portable. Do not buy these pieces of garbage; or you will be sorry. I will not buy an automatic battery charger again for as long as I live.
I was also taught that you can also do a load test with a multimeter and have someone attempt to crank the engine. Connect the meter and attempt to crank, if the voltage drops below 9 volts it's bad or going bad.....
Great video, confident to try thanks to this video. Appreciate you making this without removing the door panel, well....shouldn't need to. 🤞 Thanks again Jason.
I just recently purchased this load tester but both the directions and this video did not explain how to use the "LOAD VOLTS" and "MIN CRANK VOLTS" in the yellow area. Can someone explain how I would use this information? Thanks.
If you are handy enough, it's a great tool, the video is very instructive and can get you out of trouble. Now, I have a question, I wonder if I'll get an answer to it: There's the harbor freight digital tester which I guess is not capable of testing "load", is it worth for any reason to have both?
Ive charge mt AGM battery. It went to AGM mode then after 15mins. It goes to battery charge maintain. Is my charger broken or something with my AGM battery?
You can do all of this with just a cheap but accurate voltage multimeter, tripod with cellphone video recording on the meter display, and a screenshot of this battery load tester for reference; using the car starter as load and you can record the initial voltage of battery, the voltage drop when starting, and the charging voltage when car is started.
If it reads extremely low, select boost and run it for 5 minutes, then switch to trickle it retest and will show 12 volts....that's the "smart chip" weakness, it detects too low a voltage to attempt a trickle charge. If its bad SUL will light up.
I don't agree. if you test a brand new battery it will read about 1100cca 12.6 to 12.8v. once you charge your batt one needs to let it rest for a few hours then test. I read the needle at 850cca. batt is still good but at about 75% capacity. I wouldn't replace it yet. question: have you tried using this tester on a LiFePo4 batt?
