cleung

Hey guys,

I just bought a battery charger and it has several settings to charge the battery and I'm wondering what the max safe rate is. The charger can be set to 2A, 10A, 20A, 30A and 40A, is it safe to charge at 40A? I can't seem to find this info on my battery, I have the oem white battery.

Thanks

vkhong

No more than 2A. Higher amperage will damage your Micro Power Module (MPM).

JasonH

2A won't get you anywhere very fast. The car draws that when it's unlocked so it'll only cancel that out for the first 16 mins until the car goes to sleep. The battery is probably 90A so at 2A it would take 45 hours to charge fully (if fully discharged in the first place).

The current isn't really the problem here, it's the volts. If you connected a battery to jump start a completely flat car you could easily see 100A flowing.

What matters is the voltage the charger is putting out, if you can set it to 13.9V (float charge) and 10A then that will be fine. The car will take the current it needs (max 10A tailing off to nearly zero). More that say 14.5V peak and you're pushing in more volts than you get from the alternator when the engine is running and that's bad for all the electronics.

cleung

thanks for the info, I don't think the volts is something that I can set on my charger?

rehsifyls

Please elaborate. I've seen lots of these kind of statements on these boards and they have no basis.