This is going to be about my Super Capacitor Jump Starter - what's that? I'll try to inform you.
As I've been interested in these for several years now, I may have mentioned them before. However, now I've bought one I'm much better informed and some of you might be interested in my experience?
Jump starting is a subject which puts the "willies" up me, why? Well, modern vehicles are awash with Electronics and electronic components are notoriously well known for being fragile when not fed the required electric current, especially if an over voltage is the problem. Many of us will be aware that jumping car to car with conventional jump leads is a bit like playing Russian Roulette with your electronics - on both vehicles. I won't go into why as it's a long subject, suffice to say, I just don't jump car to car any more. However I do very happily jump start using a slave battery. At this time I have two "workshop" batteries. One is a big old 12 volt which was in my Cordoba 1.9 tdi somewhere in the high 70 ah region and too heavy to carry very far. There's also a smaller one from my boy's Punto which is around 50 ah and easier to transport but still not something I want to carry long distances. Both are very handy as power sources when I'm messing around in my workshop. The problem with using either of them is that they live in my garage not in my car! Not very convenient.
The answer of course, is a dedicated jump pack. There are so many advertised on line I just didn't know where to start
As I started to sift through them it became immediately obvious that there are many with really quite small batteries and these seem to come in either quite conventional lead acid "flavour" or more modern Li ion types the latter being usually smaller and lighter - just a bit bigger than a large mobile phone, sort of thing you can keep in the glove box. But how, I was thinking, can something this small actually start a car with a flat battery? Well, the simple answer is it probably won't. These small jump packs work because very few "flat" batteries are actually "flat. They have just dropped in voltage to the point where there is just not quite enough "oomph" to energise the starter motor - You know the situation, you twist the key and there's a quite loud clicking noise from under the bonnet - this is the solenoid attempting to engage but not quite managing it as there's not enough voltage in the battery - often around 9 to 10 volts, it varies from car to car depending on the systems. What a jump pack does is "piggy back" it's voltage onto what's left in the big battery in the car and the two combined will lift the voltage enough to allow limited cranking of the engine. The smaller the jump pack the shorter cranking time it will allow. So that immediately ruled out the smaller packs in my view.
Then I was discussing this with some motor trade friends, one of whom raised a very interesting point. You've got to remember to keep charging it from time to time. He said he goes out to cars which won't start and finds a "dead" jump starter in the boot or glovebox! also, if you don't regularly charge them and let them go completely flat they often won't accept charge. Of course my big workshop batteries sit on maintenance charge on my Smart charger so this isn't a problem with them but it would be very easy to forget to put a jump start pack on charge every few months or whatever.
I'm going to break here as this thread is now getting to long. thread resuming in a minute
As I've been interested in these for several years now, I may have mentioned them before. However, now I've bought one I'm much better informed and some of you might be interested in my experience?
Jump starting is a subject which puts the "willies" up me, why? Well, modern vehicles are awash with Electronics and electronic components are notoriously well known for being fragile when not fed the required electric current, especially if an over voltage is the problem. Many of us will be aware that jumping car to car with conventional jump leads is a bit like playing Russian Roulette with your electronics - on both vehicles. I won't go into why as it's a long subject, suffice to say, I just don't jump car to car any more. However I do very happily jump start using a slave battery. At this time I have two "workshop" batteries. One is a big old 12 volt which was in my Cordoba 1.9 tdi somewhere in the high 70 ah region and too heavy to carry very far. There's also a smaller one from my boy's Punto which is around 50 ah and easier to transport but still not something I want to carry long distances. Both are very handy as power sources when I'm messing around in my workshop. The problem with using either of them is that they live in my garage not in my car! Not very convenient.
The answer of course, is a dedicated jump pack. There are so many advertised on line I just didn't know where to start
Then I was discussing this with some motor trade friends, one of whom raised a very interesting point. You've got to remember to keep charging it from time to time. He said he goes out to cars which won't start and finds a "dead" jump starter in the boot or glovebox! also, if you don't regularly charge them and let them go completely flat they often won't accept charge. Of course my big workshop batteries sit on maintenance charge on my Smart charger so this isn't a problem with them but it would be very easy to forget to put a jump start pack on charge every few months or whatever.
I'm going to break here as this thread is now getting to long. thread resuming in a minute