What Is the Best Battery Tester?

December 6, 2021 11:40 pm Published by Leave your thoughts

Having a reliable, accurate battery tester helps you keep track of how much capacity your battery has left. It’s important that you get the right type of tester in order to accurately gauge your battery capacity.

What is the best battery tester? Battery testers can be divided into three types: electronic and load types for starting batteries and a discharge tester for deep-cycle batteries. Some testers have the characteristics of more than one category. Which type is best depends on your own situation and the type of battery you have to test.

Read on for some examples of when you might use a specific type of battery tester.

Battery testing and which testers to use

Depending on the type of battery you’re using, you will need different types of testers. These examples can help narrow down which type to try—but keep in mind that the accuracy of each tester may vary when used on your specific batteries.

A manager operating a fleet of trucks in a warm climate might choose an inexpensive tester designed to apply a fixed load to evaluate batteries. A fixed load test is sometimes not advantageous because the load may not be enough or because it puts too much strain on the battery in question.

You can use an inexpensive tester in the home: A simple battery tester is adequate to check your household batteries by reading the voltage; however, just a voltage reading is not enough to adequately evaluate a battery. If you want to get a truly accurate capacity reading, you’ll need a tester that can measure the remaining load.

What about deep-cycle testers for larger batteries? A manager of a golf course may use some of the previously mentioned testers or a discharge tester. Discharge testers test your batteries over a period of time—usually two hours, although that can vary.

For more accurate testing, use an electric tester. They work by sending a current through the battery and then analyzing the result, sometimes using complex algorithms. These testers may incorporate some type of load on the battery to help determine if a battery is in good health. In other words, a spike physical load, in conjunction with the electrical test, adds more consistency to a battery test.

Finally, there are load testers. Load testers apply a physical load to a battery in order to apply stress to a given benchmark performance. These are often bulky testers compared to their electrical counterparts from earlier time periods, but they have established consistency in determining the health of a battery. Keep in mind, however, that using this type of tester on more expensive types of batteries, like uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), can shorten the life of a very expensive battery.

When you need to know which is the best, most accurate battery tester for your household, commercial and industrial batteries, stop by Texford Battery Co. We can recommend the right kind of tester for your needs. Call or stop by today to get started.

Categorised in:

This post was written by Writer

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *