Test/review of Charger PSPower NC401

Charger PSPower NC401





I have not seen chargers from this brand before, but they have a nice line of chargers, this is can charge NiMH in AA/AAA size and 9V size.



I got the charger in a cardboard box with specifications on.



The pack included the charger and a mains cable, the manual was not ready yet.



Mains power is directly connected to the charger and it is universal voltage.



It do also have a socket for 12V power.



The charge status indicators are 3 green leds for each battery.
They show charge status will charging and one will flash.



There is a small green led for the 9V socket it will flash while charging and be steady lit when finished.
If there is an error a led done the 3 strip will flash.




The charger has the typically two level slots used for AA and AAA batteries.



And a socket for a 9V cell at the bottom of the charge slots.







Measurements charger

• When not powered it will discharge with about 0.04mA on AA cells.
  
• Power consumption when idle is 0.3 watt
  
• Charge will restart charging after power loss, or battery insertion.
  
• Charger will charge one 9V and two AA/AAA at the same time.
  

This is a good -dv/dt charge curve, the trickle charge is at about 50mA. This is a bit high for LSD (low self discharge batteries.





The other channels looks the same.





And also the high capacity cells.



No problem with the AAA, the charger uses same current as for AA cells.



The charger is a bit slow to detect a full cell, but that is fairly common with -dv/dt termination.



Four batteries are charge with nearly same speed as one battery.



The charger uses about 0.4A from 12V.



M1: 40,4°C, M2: 42,5°C, M3: 42,7°C, M4: 40,8°C, M5: 47,1°C, M6: 37,9°C, HS1: 52,0°C
Temperature is acceptable.



The charger needs about 2 seconds to initialize.



Charge current will depend a bit on number of cells in charger.


9V charging

• There is a small indicator lamp beside the 9V connector
  
• Errors are signalled by fast blinking the leds for slot 3
  

The charge current is below the rated 50mA. The termination looks like a timed termination.



The charge current depends on voltage, it will start chaging a bit above 6V and stop at 10.5V volt.


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



Conclusion

A nice little NiMH charger, it is good at AA/AAA cells and 9V is acceptable.



Notes

The charger was supplied by Power Advanced Limited for review.

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