Hello & happy New Year !
As I increasignly happend to have 5 or 6 cells to charge and was too lazy to charge them in two batches in my 4-bay chargers I recently bought the new SkyRC NC2500 Pro. (Which is quite different from the - discontinued - NC2500 non-Pro !)
Overall it works ok, but I am a bit disappointed:
The main regret for me is the charger producing very much heat. When charging 4 NiMH cells with 1.5A for example the heatsink at the bottom gets almost too hot to touch. At least the top of the charger remains a bit cooler (I have measured around 30 degrees), the batteries reach around 40 degrees. I have not seen such heat dissipation with for example the MC3000 or Maha C9000.
This might be seen as a luxury problem, but since I use small stand-alone solar-power-system for this am a bit cautious reg. the efficiency. Are they really using linar drivers in this charger ?? I will try to find out .. And if I find the time, I will maybe create a setup to measure the energy consumption vs battery-charge. 🙂
Secondly,
you can't set individual currents for the bays, the setting is always applied to all. Even though, allowedly, the charger is rather targeted for people who have to charge a high number of (similar) cells, with a charger advertised as "Pro", I would have expected to use different currents in parallel (like many other chargers, like the MC3000 or Maha C9000).
And you can't measure the battery-Ri while charging in other bays ... (again: in MC3000 you can)
To have a USB output and to see current & energy provided there is nice - but the port only works when the bays are not in use. To me, an unneccessary cut in hardware-costs. (And, btw, I would have appreciated a resulution of more than only 0.1A.) (And again: the USB output in MC3000 is always active, albeit w/o measurement.)
The charger is rather picky on the input voltage. Even when charging with 500mA it seems to use 3A or so pulse for about a 1/4 second and this leads to some drop in the input voltage when I use a different power-supply with a rather long (12V) power-cable. This lead to several "input voltage errors" and the charger stopping charge.
As with most round-cell chargers, flat-top cells do not work. (In MC3000 they do ...)
On the brighter side:
the charger seems working ok even with rather old cells, you can manually adjust the dV (1 .. 8 mV) and of course beeing able to charge 6 cells with up to 2.5A simultaneously is quite nice - and unique ! 🙂
The adaptive reduction of the charge-current depending on the Ri of the cell, as advertised, does seem to work, I will try to look closer into that later on.
I will maybe post some pictures later ! 🙂
As I increasignly happend to have 5 or 6 cells to charge and was too lazy to charge them in two batches in my 4-bay chargers I recently bought the new SkyRC NC2500 Pro. (Which is quite different from the - discontinued - NC2500 non-Pro !)
Overall it works ok, but I am a bit disappointed:
The main regret for me is the charger producing very much heat. When charging 4 NiMH cells with 1.5A for example the heatsink at the bottom gets almost too hot to touch. At least the top of the charger remains a bit cooler (I have measured around 30 degrees), the batteries reach around 40 degrees. I have not seen such heat dissipation with for example the MC3000 or Maha C9000.
This might be seen as a luxury problem, but since I use small stand-alone solar-power-system for this am a bit cautious reg. the efficiency. Are they really using linar drivers in this charger ?? I will try to find out .. And if I find the time, I will maybe create a setup to measure the energy consumption vs battery-charge. 🙂
Secondly,
you can't set individual currents for the bays, the setting is always applied to all. Even though, allowedly, the charger is rather targeted for people who have to charge a high number of (similar) cells, with a charger advertised as "Pro", I would have expected to use different currents in parallel (like many other chargers, like the MC3000 or Maha C9000).
And you can't measure the battery-Ri while charging in other bays ... (again: in MC3000 you can)
To have a USB output and to see current & energy provided there is nice - but the port only works when the bays are not in use. To me, an unneccessary cut in hardware-costs. (And, btw, I would have appreciated a resulution of more than only 0.1A.) (And again: the USB output in MC3000 is always active, albeit w/o measurement.)
The charger is rather picky on the input voltage. Even when charging with 500mA it seems to use 3A or so pulse for about a 1/4 second and this leads to some drop in the input voltage when I use a different power-supply with a rather long (12V) power-cable. This lead to several "input voltage errors" and the charger stopping charge.
As with most round-cell chargers, flat-top cells do not work. (In MC3000 they do ...)
On the brighter side:
the charger seems working ok even with rather old cells, you can manually adjust the dV (1 .. 8 mV) and of course beeing able to charge 6 cells with up to 2.5A simultaneously is quite nice - and unique ! 🙂
The adaptive reduction of the charge-current depending on the Ri of the cell, as advertised, does seem to work, I will try to look closer into that later on.
I will maybe post some pictures later ! 🙂
