Orion Advantage Charger

[bertberr]

I recently picked up a second hand Orion Advantage Carbon charger, and while I sailed through the set up process OK, I'm having a problem with both the charge and discharge modes.

Anybody with the same or similar (non lipo) charger, can you answer me this?

In the display window, the charge current stays at 0.0A, even though I set it at 1.5A during set-up. Likewise in discharge mode, even though it was set at 1A in set-up?

The timer starts as you'd expect (no delay set) but the current stays at 0.0A...???

Any ideas? Could it be a power supply problem or is the charger f**ked?

I'm using a laptop style AC adapter with output rated at 12v / 4.16A. The battery I'm trying to discharge is a 1500mAh nimh.

[bodgit]

Try hooking it up to your real car battery see if that works. Manual says imput should be between 11-15v max no mention of amps but not sure a laptop charger would be enough.
The only times my orion never charged was when there was too little charge in the batteries being charged.

[bertberr]

Did your orion advantage always show the relevant pre-set current on the top line of the LCD display whilst charging or discharging? I'd expect it to show 1.5A there for charging and 1.0A for discharging as I selected during setup...

I'll try a car battery next, though I'll need to expose some metal on the female bullet first so I can get a croc clip on. Just for this test, do you reckon I could get away with a set of car jump leads to connect the 12V battery to the charger?

[DCM]

if you don't have the manual, click HERE

[bertberr]

i've got the manual, downloaded from orion website, but thanks anyway. have to say it's probably the worst manual i've ever read, but having said that the charger is fairly easy to navigate around. in the display snap-shots they show in the charging section, it does show a current displayed, so reckon it may be the ac adapter

[bodgit]

Got my orion charger out this morning and tried to replicate your problems.
The only thing that would cause this in my efforts were
1...the battery you are trying to charge has been discharged too far. The charger will try to trickle charge it but will not charge at the full rate you have programmed in
2 You may have set the battery data wrong
eg when I tried to charge my old 3300mah mardave battery on the program for my 4600mah battery the charger will only trickle charge them and not go to the full settings. The charger computes that the battery to be charged has too low a capacity so will only trickle it.
Other than this your only hope is to take your battery to a local club and ask someone look at your charger.
1500mah is very low capacity what are you putting it in. Could be after a 5 min race the battery has just discharged way too low.