Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 05:20:17 +0000
From: Otto Schuster <oschuster@earthlink.net>
Subject: Schulze isl 8-936 impression


This is a very nice quickcharger. See it and her younger
sisters at  http://www.schulze-elektronik.com .
Have you ever plugged your battery to your "wall wart"
and wondered what it was doing and how long it would take?
The isl 8 takes the guesswork out of charging your batteries.

At 4:00 this morning I used my Cateye Stadium light for
an hour and thirty minutes, until the yellow LED lit. The
Stadium instructions say to charge it with the supplied
charger for eight hours, but this time I used my new Schulze
isl (intelligentes schnell ladegerät) 8-936 to automatically
charge it at rates up to 6.2 amps in 43 minutes.

The Turbocat NiMH battery was only partially used and,
at the sensitive Delta Peak setting, took only a half hour to
fully charge. The NiMH battery doesn't heat significantly
until it is fully charged, and then heats rapidly, at which
time the beeper on the charger signals that the charger has
dropped to trickle charge.

After a half-dozen attempts, the isl 8 has gently brought my
van's 16-month-old lead-acid starting battery for it's first time
on a charger to 14.7V and about 90% of full charge. The manual
explains that 20 hours at .1C is typical recommended rate.

I used Radio Shack 278-306 Golden Banana Plugs and Astro
Flight,  http://www.astroflight.com , gold-plated Zero Loss
connectors with Astro Flight 13-gauge 500-strand Super Flex
wire in red and black soldered to the battery packs, per manual
instructions. Recommended input to the isl 8 is a battery
12V/>90Ah, min 12V/63Ah, but I've been using a Kenwood PS-52
communications-type 20-amp power supply with ripple voltage
of less than 20mVrms (at 13.8 VDC/16A) with no problem.

The built-in LCD display gives constantly updated readouts of
time; source and target volts, amps, and amp hours; and graph
of target voltage against time. Entire charging episode can be
stored from buffer memory into non-volatile memory and charger
comes with software for PC connection.

So many batteries and so little time.

Otto