Digital Battery Tester and Analyzer - 12-Volt

Video Transcript for Performance Tool Digital Battery Tester And Analyzer Review

Hey guys, today we're gonna be going over and showing you the 12 volt digital battery analyzer and tester. So, I really like this system here, this is definitely something I would keep in my vehicle. It's really just gonna allow you to be more in touch with your vehicle, to really know what's going on. It could potentially prevent you from a breakdown or keeping you stranded somewhere. We can actually monitor several different things such as the battery health, we can test the starter and we can test the alternator. So, in some cases it could actually save you a trip to the mechanic shop.

If we have a problem with our vehicle and it doesn't start we could easily just whip this out. This is gonna let us know, okay, the battery just needs charge or the battery won't hold a charge and you need to replace the battery. Or it could also tell us that there's an issue with the starting system and that's the reason our vehicle isn't starting. So, for those do it yourself, this is really something great just to have on you. Especially all you RVers out there when you have multiple batteries, you don't wanna be stranded out in the middle of nowhere during a trip.

So, being more informed of your vehicle and being able to test everything right there on the spot is really a game changer. So, before we get started, we do need to make sure that the engine is off. You don't wanna do this test while the engine is running. We also wanna make sure all your accessories are turned off pretty much ensuring that the vehicle is not drawing any power from the battery. But once that's done, we can get started.

So, to check the status of our battery we're gonna open the hood on our vehicle here and locate the battery. Usually in the engine bay, sometimes the battery can be in the rear, in the hatch, in the trunk. It's really gonna vary by vehicle but you should be able to find this information in your owner's manual. But once we successfully find the battery we need to identify both the positive and the negative terminals. Now, the positive terminal, is usually gonna have a plus on it, it's usually indicated with a red cable, whereas the negative terminal, is usually gonna have a negative symbol on it, and it's gonna have a black cable.

So, for this particular one, it's actually printed into the top of these battery clamps. There's a plus for positive and there's a negative for minus. Yours could be a little bit different and again, it's just gonna come down to your specific application, but you need to correctly identify both the positive and the negative side of the battery. Once we've done that, we're gonna take our unit here. So, the red set of pinchers, alligator clamps, whatever you wanna call these, we're gonna hook this up to the positive battery terminal. Now, sometimes there's gonna be these little nuts on the side here that you can hook to, sometimes we'll have to hook it to that stud there, really anything we can get a nice solid contact with. And then this black pincher here is for the ground. So, we don't wanna hook that directly to the negative battery terminal. In the instructions they tell us to hook it to a ground here in the vehicle. There's actually a factory ground that's right over here which is in reach. So, we're just gonna hook up to that. And then once we attach that we should see the screen turn on, on our battery tester here. You may need to wiggle the clamps there in order to get that to come on but now you can see our back light and we're ready to test. So, to go through the procedure to test the battery. For starters, it's gonna show us the battery test option and it's gonna display the current voltage. So, 12.2 volts, it's pretty good. Now, in order to go through the testing procedure, we're gonna hit enter one time, that red arrow. So, this is gonna allow us to cycle through the battery types. So, I believe there's three different types to choose from. Regular liquid, that's just gonna be your lead-acid battery, that's in the vast majority of vehicles, we have our AGM and then we have this other option here for our gel battery. I would say the vast majority of applications it's gonna be that regular liquid, but if you're not sure, you can just simply look at your battery and there should be some identifying marks, especially if it's one of the uncommon ones such as an AGM. So just go ahead and give all the information on the top label of your battery a good read over, that way you can ensure you are selecting the correct battery type. So, once we've identified the battery type, again most of it's gonna just be regular lead-acid liquid, go ahead and hit enter. So, this is gonna bring us to our next screen. We have SAE and DIN. For everybody in the USA here you're gonna be selecting SAE. Go ahead and hit enter, there's only two options for that. Now, we need to enter the cold cranking amp capacity of our battery. So, you are gonna need to refer back to the labels on the battery here, usually this is pretty clearly labeled on the top of the battery on the label. For this particular one I can see CCA, which stands for cold cranking amps, that's gonna be 730. So, what I'm gonna do now is, I'm gonna come back to our device here and we're gonna hold these arrows over in either direction until we reach 730 or whatever your particular battery is rated for. You just wanna make sure the two matches and then we're going to hit enter. So, now it's gonna go through the testing procedure and this is gonna show us the condition of our battery. So, out of those 730 cold cranking amps that this battery is rated for, right now, we're getting 692 which indicates the battery is in good condition. And if we wanna scroll over we can actually see a percentage. The health is 94%. State of charge is 50%. So, although the battery is good, it could still stand to be charged a little bit. We've been working on this vehicle all day, so chances are we just need to get out in the highway let the alternator charge the battery up and it'd be good to go. But that's pretty much it for your options there. It's just a great way to know your battery's condition and really get some more details, so you can use to determine whether it needs replaced or charged. So, for our particular battery here, as we said, the condition is good recharge which means the battery is in good condition it just needs to be charged up a little bit. But we could also have a few other options that the screen will read such as good pass. That let's us know that the battery is charged up and it's capable of holding a charge obviously, so you don't need to worry about anything. We could also get the screen recharge retest, which means the battery is discharged. The condition cannot be determined until it needs to be fully charged. So in which case we would need to charge the battery and then we could re-perform our test. And then battery replace, that means that the battery will not hold a charge and it needs to be replaced immediately. Now, we could also get a test error screen, although rare. This would indicate that either we don't quite have the pinchers on there correctly or the battery we're testing has a cold cranking amp capacity larger than 1200, which is the limit for this particular system. So, in addition to checking the health of our battery we can also check how effective our starter system is. So, to check our starting system, we're going to repeat the same steps that we did for testing our battery but when we get to this screen here, instead of pressing enter we're gonna press our arrow to go over to the system test. Once that's done, we are gonna hit enter. Now, this is gonna give us some instructions that we need to turn off all loads on the vehicle, make sure we don't have any lights and then we need to go ahead and start the engine. So, as we can see here, we got 9.84 volts which is gonna indicate that our starting system is normal. We could also get a low rating here. If it's below a certain voltage the system will read that as low instead of normal. That let's us know our starter could be on the way out and we want to consider replacing that. And we could also get a not detected message and that's gonna let us know that there is an error with the test and we need to repeat those same steps. So, if you cycle through the settings once more, you're gonna see another screen here. This is gonna simply let us know the condition of our alternator here. We're gonna have a voltage read on the left hand side and then of corresponding figure based on that voltage read could be low, high or normal. So, another feature here of this device, very simple it has nothing really to do with the vehicle and testing it. But if we hit the over arrow three times, it's gonna bring up the LCD brightness screen, we can hit enter and then we can adjust it down or up accordingly and that's just gonna change the brightness of the back light. And once we've gone through all of our readings that's gonna do it today for our look at the digital battery analyzer and tester for 12 volt systems..