Lotus Elan and Lotus Elan Plus 2 Forums

Elanintheforest wrote:An old chum has just thrown out 4 of these chargers that he's bought over the past couple of years. He had his house supply trip out two weeks ago, and found that a switch had blown on one of the chargers, which are cheepo Chinese components. Luckily, the power tripped before a fire got going, but the unit had melted around the switch, and it was too hot to touch. He tried the others, and one more was very hot in the same area. Had the unit been in the car / boot, it could have caused a lot of damage, or even set the whole thing on fire.

He's replaced them all with good quality European spec trickle chargers.I guess that you get what you pay for!

If I understand correctly four (identical?) chargers failed, one of them catastrophically, within a couple of years, You dont actually say what make the chargers are but presumably its one that is being discussed in this thread and I for one would appreciate knowing which one it actually is?

Ian

Only one failed, another felt very hot and the other two were fine. I think that the one failure, that could have been a lot worse, was enough for him to loose confidence in the product., He did say that he hunted on the web to see if it was a known problem, and did find a few that had failures in the switch, whatever switch that was.

I've been keeping an eye out for them for a while, but they never seem to be in the shops around here. However, I won't bother now! With the garage next to the house with a thatched roof, it's not just the cars at risk!

I'm slightly confused in that there are no switches to speak of on the Lidl charger, unless you count the pressure activated microswtch on the panel from where you choose the charging program?
I'm no electronics expert but I doubt that the failure of the microswitch would result in a burn out.

Mark, could you enquire further and confirm we are discussing the same product? Picture below showing mode selector

That's the only switch on all of the chargers I've seen as well, Alan, so I guess that's the one. The one that melted was on a bike, and the hot one was on a car, but neither were on 'revive' mode, where the whole thing tends to get hot on most chargers I've used. He tended to use two of the chargers on bikes and two on cars, so there was no frequent use of the mode switch.

Sorry Alan, meant to say, I think it's the Aldi one. Are they different?

Mine is an earlier iteration of that charger.

The tactile PCB selector switch is only switching micro-amp?res if anything has overheated it will be a transistor with a dirty great heat sink possibly not properly secured or lacking heat sink compound.

I have a much bigger Aldi charger, it looks quite old school but has the same functions, its quite heavy so must have a wound transformer Inside, that has also been completely reliable.

Mind you I still have the Crypton battery charger that my father bought me for my 18th birthday, that looks like something out of Jules Verne , still working fine as well, its not used these days as the modern intelligent ones are so much kinder to batteries and will revive some lost causes.

I also have a carcoon power supply with a built in intelligent charger so have 3 modern ones in all, they are all so very similar, possibly coming from the same factory, apart from the sticky membrane switch from lack of use the Lidl one seems as good as the others.

I have just seen Jonos posting, I concur completely.

Mark,
I "think" that the Aldi and Lidl chargers are very similar products, Supposedly made to TUV standard and CE marked. Aldi & Lidl being of German origin is generally a good thing with regards to quality.

Whatever he was using, I'm pleased your friend didn't suffer any serious consequential loss and you are right to be concerned about fire safety. I feel the need to do some Googling to see if anything untoward turns up regarding these chargers that we can substantiate.

I believe this is the Aldi charger? (anyone have one of these)

yep, got two of those and they're great, better than my overpriced and under functioned Ctek at 4 times the price.

Apart from the crappy capacitors the Aldi charger seems fine. There's no power switch in it. It just has a small low power micro switch that controls a microprocessor that selects the various charging functions. With quality Rubycon and Panasonic capacitors fitted it should last a long time. The internal fuse did blow and protect anything further happening when the capacitor exploded. My Aldi charger looks the same as the previously posted picture. They may have upgraded the capacitors since mine was purchased 3-4 years ago.