Tech 101: Looking Into Lithium Battery Jump Packs
It’s the classic scenario: you’re late for the car show, the car has been sitting for a while and the battery is dead. Your buddies are waiting while you fumble around finding another vehicle to jump start it and you can’t find your jumper cables. The 21st century solution to this age-old problem are those lithium-ion… The post Tech 101: Looking Into Lithium Battery Jump Packs appeared first on The Online Automotive Marketplace.
It’s the classic scenario: you’re late for the car show, the car has been sitting for a while and the battery is dead. Your buddies are waiting while you fumble around finding another vehicle to jump start it and you can’t find your jumper cables.
The 21st century solution to this age-old problem are those lithium-ion battery jump packs. At first, these jump packs seemed too good to be true. But we tried one from a company called Micro-Start, and we had the opportunity to put it to the test, asking it to enhance the power of a near-hammered battery in our 355-cu.in. small-block-powered Chevy S-10 in 18°F weather, which it did rather handily.
There is a dizzying array of different jump packs on the market. The simpler ones are very compact and offer roughly 800 to 1,000 instantaneous amperages to kick-start a dead battery. These units all operate by using the lithium-ion battery’s high discharge rate to supply sufficient amps and voltage to crank the starter motor. The smaller units obviously will offer less capacity than larger units.
Assuming you keep the battery charged, these little units could do the job if you left the lights on in the parking lot on your big-block Chevelle. A couple of caveats are that these units do not last forever. Even when used occasionally to do little jobs like recharge your cell phone or use the flashlight option, these batteries will only last for a few years and then the entire unit must be replaced. These packs, like all batteries, suffer from reduced capacity in extreme cold or hot weather. But we discovered that if a jump pack is used on a really cold day that as the battery warms up slightly after the first attempt, the second try is often more successful.
Like any other product, there are many to choose from and the prices range dramatically. But they do perform as promised, so long as you remember they do not have an unlimited shelf life.
The post Tech 101: Looking Into Lithium Battery Jump Packs appeared first on The Online Automotive Marketplace.
