OptiMate 7 Gold Smart Battery Charger - AC to DC - 6V/12V - 10 Amp

Video Transcript for OptiMate 7 Gold Smart AC to DC Battery Charger Review

Hey everyone, it's Evangeline here at etrailer, and today we'll be talking about battery chargers. This is gonna be a good premium battery charger that is very versatile for batteries of different shapes and sizes and capacities. This is the OptiMate Gold 7 Smart Battery Charger. We'll talk about its features, what batteries are getting charged, and how it charges them here at etrailer.com. OptiMate has battery chargers for different types of applications and this is gonna be your more middle of the road type of battery charger, meaning you still get those really good premium features, but you're not paying extra for an extreme situation. This is more of your versatile, all around charger, but it's also part of the Deep Cycle category, meaning if you have, let's say unique situations, like a hybrid vehicle or you need a Deep Cycle charger, this has a special algorithm for those.

Also why it's called the Smart Charger. This is designed for lead acid batteries though, if you have a lithium battery, that's gonna be a different charger. Now whether you have a small 12 volt battery for your little farm equipment, a larger Deep Cycle AGM battery like you have in this camper, or this starter battery for a hybrid vehicle, this will work with them. So let's take this inside and take a look. So here we have the Prius and I'm gonna go and charge the battery because I used it earlier today to charge another camper battery.

Because of that, we drop below 12 volts for that battery. Now what type of battery do you have If you have an AGM, SCD, a calcium battery, GEL battery, or Deep Cycle battery, this will work as long as it's 6 volts or 12 volts. If you do have a 24 volt battery you can get a similar charger, works the same way, OptiMate 7, but that one has a 12 and 24 volt option. I'm gonna explain how this works, as well as what the different features mean, as we use this charger. So the very first step is to find your power source.

If possible, connect directly into your wall outlet. Do not use an extension cord unless absolutely necessary. And if you do use an extension cord, there's a little graph in the instructions which explains amperes, and what's the correct extension cord type. Now, once that's plugged in, keep this as far away from the battery as you could keep it. Your plug from the wall to the charger is gonna be about six feet long.

Next, take a look at your battery and see where you're gonna make your connections, and if you have enough space, so you have two options here. You can either use these little ring terminals or you can use these little alligator clamps. If you want a quick and easy solution, go with the clamps. If you want to just leave these on your battery, and that way you can keep this sticking out for whenever you need to charge. Go ahead and install these. If you do choose the slightly more permanent solution, you do have a little fuse here for safety, and you have a cap for your connector. So this is going to be an SAE connector that matches most of your battery chargers. Today we are just going to use our clamps. So we're gonna put the red, or the positive connection first and then we are next going to do the ground connection. If you do not have a ground terminal, go find a clean spot on your frame to ground out the connection. With all that figured out, we're then going to connect our battery. So this is your DC connection, plug that in, and now we're going to connect our AC power connection. Once you do make that connection, your charger is going to light up, and now you can make your selection for what kind of voltage you have. We are currently on a 12 volt battery. It is actually automatically selected the battery because it's a smart charger, and you really only need to change the selections if you have a special battery, like a spiral cell battery, or some of your sealed AGM batteries. Now to make that selection, you disconnect your battery, you select through, and then you can see the orange light, giving you different voltage options. So selecting is step one. Step two is if something was wrong, maybe you switched around the red and the black clamps. That's okay. It automatically does a reverse polarity check on you and will stop if you have that happen. Now, if you don't have any errors, you'll move on to step three, which is preparing to charge. So you may have like a one or two second delay after plugging in, where it's like thinking about it, and then it goes into step four. My battery's actually charging very quickly and is going through the different steps. So if I didn't have a good battery and maybe it was sulfated or deeply discharged, then it would be in step four which is save. This is where they try to recondition it, and then current is delivered in pulses to prepare the battery to accept normal charge. Once it goes above 50% charge though, it goes into step five, which is then charge mode, or our middle light. The step we are in right now, which is step six, is optimized. So once you reach your maximum current for the first time that's when you enter into this level. So what it does is now it tries to equalize those individual cells so it goes into the battery and it's not just charging but it's actually optimizing the battery. And this can take between 10 minutes to two hours to fully do, depending on your battery health, or your state of charge. This is really where OptiMate does most of its best work optimizing the battery. We haven't done that yet, but once we reach 100%, we are going to go into step seven. So this is going to be the testing after the charge. So see that check mark That will light up once we reach that higher state of charge. That actually took about 15 minutes, from when I first plugged it in, all the way up to the green check mark. So now we are ready for after it tests its charge, the final step, which is step eight, and this is gonna be where it maintains the battery and it does it in a bunch of different ways depending on your battery, depending on what it needs. It also has temperature compensation, because whether it's cold or hot, your batteries are gonna react differently. And since it's a smart charger, it knows that and it compensates for it too. It also has things like a continuous float charge meaning every 30 minutes it changes on whether it's delivers current or not. Just a full testing of your battery, and making sure it's all good. Because of that special algorithm, for deep cycle batteries, it can bring it up to not just 100%, but sometimes even 105% for performance. So you can use this long term as well. And I know some places that just keep the battery chargers plugged in all the time and they just plug it into their vehicles, their motorcycles, whatever batteries need charging, whenever they need charging. Some notes on that is you do have the option to mount this to a spot. There are different holes, two holes on top, two holes on the bottom that you can use with screws, not included, or zip ties, not included either. Now if you did wanna take advantage of that temperature compensation, I do recommend keeping it near your battery so it's in the same climate as it, and then it can react accordingly. Also, if you do wanna keep this plugged in pretty much permanently and just plug in the battery whenever, that's fine because this actually has an eco mode. So with the battery disconnected, this goes into a very low power draw so that way there's no issues with leaving it plugged into the outlet. And the specific charger you saw here was the OptiMate 7 Gold Smart Charger for 6 volt and 12 volt batteries. My name is Evangeline and I hope you enjoyed the journey.