Test/review of Efest LUSH Q8 Charger 2018

Efest LUSH Q8 Charger 2018





This is a simple 8 cell mains powered LiIon charger without any settings.



It arrived in a cardboard box with specifications on it and a cartoon (Efest do that on all their charger boxes).



The box included the charger, a external power supply, a warranty card and the instruction sheet.



The charger has a DC socket for 12V input.



The power supply is a standard small 12V supply with a Efest label.



The only user interface is a led light for each channel, white when charging and blue when finished, on error it will flash.



Specifications are on the bottom, but not very easy to read.



The slots uses the classical slider construction and it works fine.
The slots can work from 27mm to 73mm. This means that it will handle just about all 18650/26650/21700 batteries, only exception is protected 21700.



The two 2A slots are marked, but it is not a very visible marking.







The charger can handle 73 mm long batteries including flat top cells.
The charger current is on the high side for many small cells.



Measurements

• Slot #1 and #8 can charge with 2A, all other slots are 1A
  
• When not connected to power it will discharges with about 0.14mA.
  
• Below 0.55V the charger will not detect a battery
  
• Between 0.55V and 1.3V the charger will charge with a few mA
  
• Between 1.3V and 1V the charger will charge with about 100mA
  
• Above 3V the charger will use regular charging.
  
• Charger can charge with 4A total and will adjust total charge current to fit, this means first it will drop to 1A on all slots, then 0.5A.
  
• When a cell is full, the others will be charged with the higher current.
  
• Charger will not restart silent if voltage drops.
  
• It will restart charging on reinsertion of the battery or power cycling if the battery is above 4.1V.
  
• Power consumptions when idle without battery is 0.4 watt
  

This is a fairly standard CC/CV voltage charge curve with about 110mA termination current.








These 6 slots will only charger with 1A, the termination is about the same.



And a final 2A slot.




No problem with other capacities.



This older cell is also charged fine.



A larger cell, that can better handle the 2A current.



Sometimes the charger failed, it did report it on the leds, but I never figured out why. It is not a big issue, just take the battery out and put it in again and the charger will charge it.



With 8 batteries in the charger all slots gets downgraded to 0.5A charge current



M1: 39.0°C, HS1: 46.4°C



M1: 35.2°C, M2: 37.5°C, M3: 37.8°C, M4: 37.4°C, M5: 37.4°C, M6: 37.3°C, M7: 35.9°C, M8: 33.7°C, HS1: 49.3°C




Sweeping the battery voltage from zero to 4.25 shows charge current at the different charge levels. The first curve is for a 2A slot, the second for a 1A slot.



The charger needs a few seconds to start.


Testing the power supply with 2830 volt and 4242 volt between mains and low volt side, did not show any safety problems.



Conclusion

This charger is a good and simple LiIon charger, but I am missing a better marking of the 2A slots and would have like two 0.5A slots for smaller batteries (Efest smaller high current batteries can be charged at 1A).




Notes

The charger was supplied by Efest for review.

Here is an explanation on how I did the above charge curves: How do I test a charger