Inexpensive Digital Readout Battery Tester

Guys, I bought a bunch of these digital battery testers that I'm donating to a fund raiser auction plus I think I'm going to give my kids one. They weren't very much money and you know typically you get what you pay for. They are kind of cheaply built but they do work well. I found out that they have about a 50mA load on them. So I hooked up my Fluke meter and attached a load that matched the 50mA drain and saw what the voltage on the particluar battery I was testing was 1.344V. On 4 of these BT-168D's I got 1.34v, 2 were at 1.35V and 2 were at 1.33V. I guess that is good enough.

I'm going to laminate a card (about credit card size) to go with them as you can see in the picture to give someone an idea as to how much is left in their batteries. Hope I got the values right. I had to do some interpolation from some spec sheets.

I have been using this cheap battery tester for years, see ebay number below, and it works great, and is easy to read, and the channels are loaded.

I also have an Ansmann energy check which costs a lot more.

Ebay Item number: 230953361549

John.

We've been using two ZTS minis for years. I got them for under $30 each at BatteryJunction. Saved hundreds and hundreds of dollars on body mic batteries with the one we keep at the theatre. I wouldn't be without one.

Thanks for the heads-up! I've ordered a couple for use around home.

I thought I'd provide a followup to these battery testers. I initially had bought 7 off of Ebay (from China).......I know you take your chances sometimes. Well, the first 7 I got were acceptable as far as accuracy goes. They were being sold as "used-other". And they did not come in a package and some did kind of looked used but they all worked.

Then I needed to buy another 3 and decided to buy from another reseller that was advertising them as "new". Well sorry to say, these did not read very accurate at all, were definitely not new. I tried to change out a resistor divider to make them accurate but all it did was introduce a non-linear aspect to measuring the voltage.

So beware if buying these from you know where.

They sell them on 7dayshop.com for £5.99 each with free shipping.