I was looking into the advantages of changing the way my Zapino charges. It looks like there are 2 ways to upgrade from the (included) string charger: 1.) Separate and wire the system for bank charging (and then buy 5 separate chargers), 2.) or wire in the PowerCheq Battery Balancing System which case you also have to buy 4 of these PowerCheq's.
What are the advantages to each and or the cost differences? Do I have this all wrong? I am not and expert on this and am learning.
Hi Weissp,
This has been covered (a long time ago now).
Id suggest having a bit of a search through the archives.
I'd use bank charging personally as its more precise, though more susecptible to a failure leaving your batteries not charged, if a single charger fails.
This assumes i was forced to stick with lead.
if you are planning on using your zapino long enough to be thinking of balancers, dont bother.
save your moeny and change over to lithium.
even with balancers, the best scooter mileage i have ever seen from a lead acid (or silicon) set of batteries is 6000km (and range at end of life is *well* down from new).
The lithium batteries in my scooter on the other hand have done 20'000km and only lost 15% of original capacity (and ive been hammering them aswell).
Matt
Daily Ride:
2007 Vectrix, modified with 42 x Thundersky 60Ah in July 2010. Done 194'000km
I first tried using a battery balancer on my Zapino and the product did not work well. It was BattEQ and it constantly had to be rebooted for it to work. Apparently it is very sensitive to the voltage differences among the batteries and if the voltages get to far apart it goes "offline". In any case, I scrapped that approach and changed to bank battery charging following the recommendations of others. It cost me about $160 for five good 6 amp chargers and a few more dollars for the wire and Molex connectors. However, it was well worth the money because after I began the bank charging the batteries began providing much more driving range. Presently I have 1700km on the Zapino and I can get about 20 miles on a full charge. I think I damaged the batteries somewhat using the Zapino string charger for the first 8 months I owned the scooter. Before switching to bank charging I was getting about 5 miles per full charge.
Steve Tanner