NOCO Genius Multi-Bank Smart Battery Charger - AC to DC - 2 Bank - 6V/12V - 4 Amp

Video Transcript for NOCO Genius Multi-Bank Smart Battery Charger Review

Hi, everyone, Aidan here at etrailer. Today, we're gonna be taking a look at the NOCO Genius Multi-Bank Battery Charger. Now, this version specifically is gonna let you charge up to two pieces of equipment, such as an ATV, a lawnmower, maybe a side-by-side, and charge and maintain the batteries. For us today, we're getting into the winter season, so it's gonna be perfect to hook these up and help maintain the batteries through the cold season when they're not getting used as much. Let's check it out. Now, first thing, we've got two leads coming off of it.

These are the two leads that will go to the two four-wheelers that we've got pulled up today. And you can see separate controls for both of those where we can check battery levels and things like that. That's gonna come a little bit later though. And the middle one that I have hooked up here is our AC wall outlet. It's gonna be 75 inches long, so that's probably my most immediate complaint.

It is removable if we need it to. But this is gonna be the thing that I think limits you, because you wanna have this set up by an outlet, and use of an extension cord is not advised. So in order to bring these inside, you'll need to carve out some space near an outlet for them. The leads themselves are gonna be up to 10 feet long. So these ones are pretty short, but they'll connect to a longer stretch that hooks up to our equipment.

Now, when hooking this up, you wanna get the clamps on the battery of your equipment first. So positive to positive, negative to negative. We wanna do the positive first. And I'll try to keep my hands out of the way as best I can. These aren't the strongest clamps out there, so if your battery's hard to reach or the posts are small, you might find that you have troubles hooking it up.

But get them connected, and you'll have a lead end right here, and the bulk of the length will be separate. So if you ever needed to disconnect it, you could kinda separate it into multiple pieces. Hook the two ends together like that until the red clip clicks into place, and we'll bring the other end of this 10-foot cable near the wall. We've got both of our four-wheelers hooked up. I'll plug them both into the main unit here. Just try to keep an eye on which one I plugged into slot number 1 and which one I plug into slot number 2. Not that it really matters for the function of it, but just so I can know how the batteries are doing. And then the main power cord would plug into a wall outlet. You could also wall mount this unit with the two screw holes on the side. This is a very temporary setup for us to just test this out today, which is why it's on the ground and why we're not pulled inside completely. But for you at home doing this, again, you'd probably wanna make this a more permanent setup for the longer cold season. But we'll just get this plugged in last. And the box will power on and detect what battery type we've got, and it'll start to charge. So it's showing low battery right now, but it'll cycle through. And as we start to charge up, it'll fill and figure out what the percentage is even at. Now, I expect that we'll find that slot number 1 stays actually pretty low, 'cause we did have problems starting that one up and bringing it over. But slot number 2, I think, should be pretty okay. We'll let this run for a bit and see where it lands. And after letting that sit for not even five minutes, we're showing that our second one, the one that I expected would be fine, is actually fine, we're in the green there. And the one that I plugged into slot number 1, after it kinda registered what percentage it was at, it is low. So we're gonna let that just keep charging for a while, since we've got it hooked up, we might as well. But that'll let you know what we're at. And when it is in the green, that's when it switches over to just a maintenance mode. I do wanna talk about some of the other options here, because there are single versions of this charger. If you just have the one lawnmower that you bring into your shed for the winter, you can just have that one hooked up. Or if you've got more than just the two pieces of equipment, maybe up to four, you can get a charger that'll do four as well. So the options from NOCO are there, you can find those options here at etrailer if you need them. The thing I would recommend that I think would be especially useful for this four-wheeler here where the battery's really hard to get to is ring terminals. You're gonna just hook those up to the battery terminals, it'll give you the same lead that is just a plug and play connector like we have here with the battery clamps, but it's gonna always stay attached, and that lead will just get tucked up somewhere out of the way of hot or moving parts. The benefit there is you don't have to get your hand in there and try to get those battery clamps on every single time you need to charge it. It's just a plug and play connection, and you're on your way a lot quicker. So for something like this, I think it's really useful. And even for a piece of equipment that we're just charging regularly, it takes a step out of the equation and makes it a little more permanent and easier for us to do. There are a variety of battery types this will work with. Right now, it's just set to a normal 12 volt battery, but it will work with a GM and lithium-ion, but then, also, normal six volt batteries. And to cycle between those modes, you would just hit the button right next to MODE, and it would cycle through. And if you we inchesre to lose power for whatever reason and this unit resets whenever the power comes back on, it does have a smart memory feature where if you had it changed over to let's say lithium, it would remember, "Hey, I was set to lithium." It'll go back there and not be on the wrong battery type. A couple other things to note while this is charging, each bank can output a maximum of two amps, so four in total, two for each bank. They are gonna be fused, so it'll protect from dangerous overloads. And for operating temperatures, the whole unit can operate anywhere from -4 degrees Fahrenheit, all the way up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. So for those colder winter months, you can rely on it working properly. A couple other nice features here is that this will provide a custom charge profile, and really, all that means is it'll analyze the battery condition and change the charge profile based on that. So we can kinda see that with our number 1 slot, that ATV that was a lot lower battery and that we had trouble starting, it ramped up pretty quick. And now that it's sitting here near full charge, it's not switched over to the plain green just yet, it's been sitting here for quite some time, so that charging has slowed down a bit. Overall, that custom profile is going to help provide a quicker charge, but keep that battery protected from overcharging still. The other thing is that if the battery is damaged, it does have a repair mode where it can restore some lost capacity. So overall, I think this NOCO charger is a solid piece of equipment. My real complaint with it is just the cable length. I think that's a real big minus for it. And then the fact that it doesn't include the eyelets and you have to buy them separately for those harder to reach batteries, I think is also kind of a shame. It'd be cool if it just came with it out of the box, because this is probably something you're gonna use seasonally, and you want it to be easy when it is time to do it. But if you add those things separate and you've got a good space in your shop to get all your equipment pulled in around an outlet where you can even bring the batteries to it, then I think it's gonna be a really solid way to keep those batteries charged, maintained, and repaired. Thanks for watching.