I'm building a motorized skateboard and after choosing a 500W electric motor, I needed batteries to power it. Cross comparing Lead Acid, NiMh, and NiCd showed that NiMh would get me the best bang for my buck. So, I ordered batteries (to build a pack) and realized I'll need a charger if I wanted to properly maintain my batteries.

So, here steps in batteryspace. The charger is simple and easy to use. I just connect up the batteries (initially using the alligator clamps that were provided - later I will make a tamiya connector) and attached the temperature probe. At this point, patience is required. The charger will go through some startup thing where the lights flash, however, it will not attempt to charge your batteries until it detects that 20 cells are connected. I didn't realize this and so I was frustrated when it "seemed" like the charger was doing nothing.

This charger is a life saver. I've blown a battery pack before because it overheated when charging, melted the insulation between the wires and shorted battery terminals to each other. For any homebrew electronics enthusiasts who make their own packs, this is a must have.

1) Smart Charger feature - Detects when battery is fully charged, kinda hard to do that with a power supply
2) Two current switch - useful if you need to charge the battery or maintain (trickle charge) it.
3) Fuse protection - if something bad happens with the charger, your batteries are protected or vice versa.
4) Standard tamiya connector - easily connect to many battery packs or electric scooter motor controllers. Also, tamiya connectors are polarized, making it hard for you to accidentally connect your battery incorrectly, which brings up the fact that the charger can sense incorrectly connected batteries.

So, those are the good, now about the bad:

1) The instructions are very simple and its been only recently that the website has been updated to give more details on its use. So, based only on the instructions that ship with the charger, one could get frustrated and think the charger does not work.

2) Well, I know that this is a 0.6A/1.2A charger, however, 2A charging capability is not too much to ask for. Most 24V battery packs are 8-12Ah and so can sustain higher charging rates.

Interactions with Batteryspace staff

1) So, I initially thought something was wrong and requested an RMA. However, I didn't recieve a response for about a week. After calling the customer service number was I directed on how to return the charger.

2) The charger was returned to me without any information about what was done with it or any more information about the problem I was having. As a result, it was up to me to figure out what was the actual problem.

Overall:

This is a decent charger and nicely priced (especially for a NiMh one). It has features typical of most smart chargers which are neccessary when dealing with batteries with capacities of 24V 10Ah. That's 240W which is pretty dangerous if you were to accidentally short terminals together or misconnect them. It would be nice to have more detailed instructions which indicate what the user should expect to happen when using it, perhaps a copy of the current batteryspace website dedicated to the product should replace the current instructions.