Charger PSPower NC402





I have not seen chargers from this brand before, but they have a nice line of chargers, this is one of the simplest. It can charge for one to four NiMH batteries.



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.



The charge status indicators are simple red/green leds, one for each battery.
They are red while charging and green when finished. When the slot is empty the led is off.




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







Measurements charger

• When not powered it will discharge with about 1mA on AA cells.
• Power consumption when idle is 0.7 watt
• Charge will restart charging after power loss, or battery insertion.

The charger is rather slow to terminate, it need more than one hour to detect that it has filled the battery.
It cannot be -dv/dt termination, with multiple batteries its current it too low, but maybe 0/dt termination.
Trickle charge is low at around 4mA (good).





The slow termination is present on all slots.





With the higher capacity cell it takes longer, but termination still takes nearly an hour.



The AAA battery was only half an hour to termination.



Even a full cell takes an hour to detect.



With more batteries the current will change when some of batteries are finished.



M1: 45,7°C, M2: 49,1°C, M3: 50,9°C, M4: 49,6°C, M5: 65,6°C, HS1: 97,9°C



The charger needs about 3 seconds to initialize.



Charge current will depend on number of cells in charger.


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



Conclusion

The charger is a nice small size and has individual control on all channels and there is no high trickle charge, but I do not like the slow termination.

I will rate it as 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