Experiences with CTEK 'CS FREE' battery charger?

G

gtx

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Bailey Alliance76-2T
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Hello, I am thinking of purchasing this product to maintain the M/H's cranking battery whilst it is in situ, in storage, some miles away. Unfortunately, electricity is unavailable at the storage facility. Has anyone purchased the CTEK 'CS FREE' product?
If so, I would be very interested in learning about experiences:
Q1 Which retailer/merchant was it purchased from?
Q2 Was there an attempt to return it for some reason/s?
Q3 Has anyone attempted testing, and then attempted to return it, due to being unhappy with the results?
Q3 On the assumption that the cranking battery had been fully charged when putting the M/H into storage, how many days did the cranking battery stay fully charged before the CS Free charger ran out of juice?
Q4 Are there thresholds whereby the charger will turn itself off before its Lithium battery is damaged?

The reason for asking these questions is that Halfords, their main retail outlet, has a 'Returns' procedure that expects goods to be unused, with no damage to the packaging, unless of course, goods are being returned due to a manufacturing fault.

Thank you in anticipation.

CS FREE

40-462
www.ctek.com www.ctek.com
 
Quite a few reviews here...

Broken Link Removed

Am I being thick? What does 'CS Free' stand for/mean?
 
VXman said:
Quite a few reviews here...

Broken Link Removed

Am I being thick? What does 'CS Free' stand for/mean?
Click to expand...
CTEK is the name of the Swedish manufacturer and 'CS FREE' is one of its products. This product is a charger that has an internal lithium battery and one of its intended uses is to remotely charge batteries where there's no electric hook-up. www.ctek.com
 
The CS Free has an internal battery with a capacity of 66Wh, equivalent to 66 / 12 = 5.5Ah at 12V. So it will have obvious limitations if it is trying to stop a 100Ah battery discharging to say 50% over a month. If the battery is losing say 50Ah in 30 days, then that's 50 / 30 = 1.7Ah per day, so it won't take long to use up 5.5Ah from the CS Free battery. And for some reason many motorhomes seem to lose charge from the starter battery much faster than a car or van would, so 30 days is very optimistic for some.

So, using the internal battery of a CS Free is not really a solution for keeping a motorhome battery topped up in storage. I think you would need either a bigger battery or be able to take it home to recharge it every few days.

If you had a big spare 12V battery you could use that with the CS Free to charge the motorhome batteries - it can work as a charger from one battery to another. I think you'd be better using that arrangement to top up the batteries every month or so, rather that keeping it topped up all the time. But that depends on how easy it is to access your storage site.
 
gtx said:
CTEK is the name of the Swedish manufacturer and 'CS FREE' is one of its products. This product is a charger that has an internal lithium battery and one of its intended uses is to remotely charge batteries where there's no electric hook-up. www.ctek.com
Click to expand...

I know ctek - I have had one of their chargers for 10 years. I just wondered what 'CS free ' stood for or meant? Thought it would have some connection to the the product but I don't quite see how.

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The CS Free is a relatively new product from CTEK. It's a 'do-it-all' type of product. It works like one of their standard 240V intelligent mains chargers, it can also charge from one battery to another, and it has its own internal battery so it can put some charge into a flat battery.
 
Thank you all. Having seen some negative reviews on Amazon in particular, I felt I needed to test before purchasing, but the 'Returns' policy do not seem to allow for this. I was aware of all of the product options, and was hoping someone was using the slave option because all the critical reviews were pointing towards this as the only viable option. Its is a lot of dosh, and will wait to see if CTEK make any changes. Once again, thank you all for taking the time to assist.
 
thinking outside of the box, if the issue is that you wish to keep the battery topped up, then why not just disconnect it? then when you arrive to collect you could just reconnect it? if the battery does go flat, then its no different to disconnecting it , but you dont then need to charge the battery.... or am i missing something in my simplistic comment? if the intent is to power the alarm when the motorhome is in storage, etc then of course it becomes a different issue to resolve, but the OP's intent was to ensure the engine could turn over when they arrived at the storage unit.
 
Thank you. The Tracker would not survive for long. Apart from that, I have the facility in the cab to disconnect but then the immobliser would not function. If by disconnect you were meaning to physically disconnect, then there are implications of ECU settings, apart from the above negatives. The CS Free option of using a spare battery to hook up the charger is likely to be the way to go but I will wait a bit longer and see what happens.
 
It seem strange to have something that’s battery powered to keep another battery topped up or am I missing something.

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Tere is no power at the storage unit and solar does not work too well undercover. Batteries are sensitive to hot and cold temperatures, which means during winter the m/h needs to be brought home for a top-up more frequently. This gadget has the potential to make life less complicated. Get to storage, clip it on, monitor the status remotely via the Tracker and return to storage, unclip the charger or slave battery and get it topped, then back to storage and clip charger/slave battery back on. And so it goes on.

Search only for "Tempra
 
Auto Express online has just done a sort of review of battery chargers maybe worth a look.
 
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Richard n Ann said:
Did you not see @autorouter comment above? It has the battery capacity of 5.5ah, that's about twice the capacity of my phone 🫣
Click to expand...
Not quite as bad as that, your phone battery voltage is about 3.8V, not 12V. The energy capacity (Wh) depends on the voltage too. But it's still not good. I have a 125cc scooter which has a 7Ah 12V battery (7 x 12 = 84Wh).
 
Hi gtx
From what I have read thus far, you mention you do not have any mains electric at the storage site. You also cannot rely on any Solar as the van is in storage under cover.
So now I have to ask, how much capacity do you have with your leisure battery set up?
If you haven't as yet then Why don't you fit a Vanbitz Battery Master (or similar) between the cranking battery and the leisure batteries, to keep or at least extend the life of the cranking battery.
If your leisure battery set up is large enough it will take a long time to deplete them by sending a constant 1amp trickle to the cranking battery, or at least take longer before you have to bring the van back home to charge all batteries on mains hook up.
If you have a battery master already it should be fine I would have thought, but have to ask as no mention of having one.
LES

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I had planned a trip to Vanbiz this year to have him advise/install. The CS FREE would have given me more options. Everything is on the table as the saying goes! Thank you.
 
The Vanbitz battery master is available through Fun with 10% discount. Its very small sealed black box 50mm square almost weightless unit, and only has 3 wires to connect, 1live to the cab battery, one live to the leisure battery, and one common negative to the chassis or common earth.
If you can find the live feeds to battery connections ie:B1&B2 inside your charger/control unit, ie: Sergeant, CBE or Electroblock then it will only take 10 mins to connect the Vanbitz Battery master. If thats not so easy then simply extend the cables to reach the positive battery terminals on the cab & leisure battery, put a small fuse close to the battery connection to protect from cable being chaffed or short circuited.
There is a Red LED to show if its charging the cab battery, and when its fully charged its green.
Good luck, best £50 quid I ever spent on the MH.
LES
 
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surely your better of to add a battery which will double the time you have assuming its the same size as existing thge other method would be a single wire plus to plus from leisure to starter battery for safety a small low amp fuse either end
 
Not the CTEK CS Free model but talking of CTEK, my CTEK MXS25 charger gave up the ghost only a month outside of its warranty expiring this year. I must have only used it a handful of times to boost the leisure batteries and given the purchase cost against the number of times I got to use it was most disappointing.
It's put me off the CTEK brand with any replacement. I bought CTEK as it seemed the best on the market at the time.
CTEK did say that they will look at it if I send it to their Sweden workshops but would not guarantee fixing it and I had to pay a £150 fee.
Think I will use my £150 towards the replacement.
My advice is shop around as the expensive brands don't always last.
Apologies that this does not answer your CS Free part of your questions.
 
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