Enerdrive Battery Charger Review

Enerdrive Battery Charger Review and Commitment to Support - by Chris McClellan from Enerdrive

Two years is a long time right, sure it is. But in business 2 years can fly by in an instant and sometimes you need to just step back and review your progress and take stock of what has been achieved. My review this past week has been to assess, in detail, our ePOWER Battery Charger range which started 4 years ago with the initial prototype battery charger design and development. I also looked at the integration of these products with our all new ePOWER DC2DC Battery Charger that has literally just hit the racking in our warehouse ready to go to market.

Battery chargers are often a “set and forget” part of any battery system that gets ignored until it stops working. I’m the first to put my hand up and admit we’ve had our fair share of charger issues over the years, and a long time ago I began to understand the importance of the battery charger in any battery system. But how many people really understand what a charger does, it just charges your batteries right?

Sure it does, but there’s more to consider. Let’s look at a typical caravan battery system for example. Show me an electrical product that, once turned on, runs flat out for up to 8 hours at a time, day in, day out. A 40amp battery charger typically will pull upwards of 700watts AC to operate, and when you compare that to even household appliances, there’s not much that comes close to the actual ‘usage’ that a battery charger receives.  With that level of usage, things can go wrong and if you’ve used any brand of battery charger you’ll know that often things DO go wrong. That’s where Enerdrive’s commitment as a manufacturer kicks in, to ensure that the product gets up and running again and again with as little wear and tear on the charger as possible giving you, the customer, piece of mind that our product is going to perform reliably.

To set Enerdrive apart from our competitors and offer a 100% locally backed battery charger we launched the ePOWER battery charger range. The goal was to overcome a number of issues that we and our customers were experiencing. The majority of those issues were long term reliability, poor AC power input and more importantly the chargers ability to adapt to modern battery system requirements. The lithium market has helped drive this change rapidly, much quicker than when AGM batteries first arrived on the scene in the early 2000’s. Ordinary smart battery chargers just don’t work on lithium batteries for varying reasons. So we set out to develop a battery charging system that would work efficiently and reliably.

Enerdrive have had years of real world experience with a range of battery chargers and battery systems that has defined what we needed to implement in our own battery chargers. From the flexibility of fluctuating AC input sources such as generators and outback mains supplies, through to tweaking how multibank charging systems worked to prevent battery damage on the start and generator batteries due to the extended period of time a charger spends on absorption voltages. The ideas and knowledge existed, we just needed to find a partner to build them for us. The obvious choice was the factory that I have personally sold around 50,000 units over 20 years from, and know and trust the production and engineering capabilities. Their long history as a builder of power electronics is evident in the quality they build into our entire ePOWER product range.

Now, two years later, our new generation of ePOWER chargers has evolved with improved features and long term reliability. During development we had some misses and wins, each experience has helped us grow and improve our product to become the most trusted battery charger range for all RV, mobile and marine battery systems in Australia. We have already tweaked our functionality twice in the last 2 years by altering our charger profiles to better suit current AGM and GEL battery types, and the quirky requirements that lithium batteries have (who would have thought that .1vdc would make such a big difference).  Improvements to functionality and reliability continues to happen behind the scenes to this very day.

ePOWER Battery Charger Features

* Multistage Charging: Fully automatic multistage battery charger with the ability to charge 3 separate battery banks.

* Separate Battery Banks: Isolated charging design where battery bank one is separate from battery bank two and three.

* Programmable: Battery bank 1 can be programmed with a different charge algorithm over banks 2 and 3.

* Current Control: User adjustable current output (e.g. Dial the 60amp unit back to run off a 1kVA generator).

* Smart Charging: The ePOWER battery charger will regulate its output based on the loads connected to your battery banks.

* Wide AC Input Range: Operates on both 110V / 60Hz and 240V / 50Hz.

* LED Display: Easy to use “set and select” menu along with scrolling charger status.

* Silent Mode: Disables the cooling fan for total silent operation at night or whenever required. Activation reduces charge output by half and locks out fan for 12 hours.

* Temperature Sensor: Battery temperature sensor included with 3 meter cable.

* 5 Year Warranty (2 Years Standard + 3 Years Pro-Rata) from an Australian company renowned for customer support.

Our Support Declaration:

Our customers have come to expect a high level of support from Enerdrive when problems occurred, so if we’re going to put our name to our service then why not put our name to our products. For such a long time I have been proud of the products that we represent and they have had some of the best reputations for support in the Australian market consistently for the past decade. Our entire Enerdrive range has grown stronger as a result of this.

To backup this level of commitment we make this declaration to our customers; “Enerdrive intends to look after our products and the valued customers that use them. For many years we have provided a same day dispatch service for chargers under warranty all across Australia and now we make this our commitment to the end user”.

Our warranty terms for all Enerdrive products is two years, but our commitment to these products has and still goes beyond our statuary obligations. Repair of products these days is near impossible for anything electrical, so replacement is really the only solution. As a result, for the past few years we have offered a pro-rata service program to the users of our products, but never promoted this assistance. We publicly promote our warranty support as 2 years product with an additional 3 years pro-rata should anything go wrong for absolute customer peace of mind.

Enerdrive’s terms are simple, genuine and focused, we strive to get customers out of strife when they need to use our products the most. These terms are honest and genuine, and you can be rest assured that your customers will feel at ease that all efforts to help them will be undertaken when they need it the most.

A very big thank you for your support, and we look forward to helping you all out for a long time to come yet.

Best Regards,
Chris McClellan
Enerdrive

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