Suggestions on chargers

Just put together an ebike with a parts kit from california-ebike.com. I got their 17 AH battery which came with a fairly generic charger. It's all working as advertised.

But I don't want to routinely charge to 100% each time. I'm trying to choose a charger with a settable limit (80%, etc).

There's the Cycle Satiator which sounds great, but wow its pricey! $350 with the adapter cable. By all accounts it sounds great. I can't see how it's worth three times the price. Am I wrong here?

The Luna ("Luna Charger 48V Advanced 300W Ebike Charger") has the right feetch, but lots of reports of a relay clicking incessantly once it reaches terminal charge (80%), and customer support issues from Luna, but most seem dated to 2020 and 2021. It's $110 with adapters.

There's Bafang's charger ("48V Advanced Smart Quick Battery Charger") their stuff seems great, why am I looking at anything else? 95 bucks.

Any user experience with these things?

static,
static avatar

Do you have a way to measure the current voltage?
The percentage is just an odd way of measuring voltage, I know a bit about batteries, nothing about ebikes.

If it's just about batteries, why limit yourself to ebike providers?

irkli,

I know a fair amount about Li battery tech and chemical behavior, from small scale electronics applications. The ebike display has options to display battery state as voltage or percentage; I chose percentage. It doesn’t matter in one sense, once you get to know the system (“characterization”) then you know where to worry about range etc and when to not.

ebike-specific does matter because there are … popular conventions (“standards? we have lots of standards!”) for connectors, battery configuration (as in stacked series/parallel batteries of cells), connectoring, etc. The “smart chargers” are Li charger tech that certainly internally uses terminal voltage to determine what’s 100%, 90%, etc.

I could memorize the arbitrary battery terminal voltages, but in the end, I just chose the simpler percentage and will work it out as I go.

I’m new to ebikes so I reserve the right to be wrong and change everything! lol

irkli,

Also there is this device, mentioned on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ebikes/comments/ttznio/how_i_charge_my_ebike_battery_to_80_using_a_cheap/

https://www.icstation.com/m604-charge-control-module-battery-protection-board-controller-lithiumlead-acid-battery-solar-panel-p-11314.html

Given I have a decent un-smart controller, this may be a choice for folks like me willing to wire and package it.

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