New Tool!!! Hawkins 600A B.L.T. Battery tester.

[AndyD]

Hawkins 600A B.L.T. Battery tester.



I'm always excited to buy new tools but I was particularly excited with this one because it's locally made (Durban).

As it says on the tin, it's a 600Amp battery tester that puts a variable, selectable load on a battery and tests the voltage it maintains under the load. It can test 6 volt and 12 volt batteries and it's very useful for anyone who works on deep-cycle lead acid battery powered back-up inverters/UPS's or even automotive batteries.

It's a crude but fairly effective way of testing the charge a battery can hold and deliver under an electrical load. It uses a large, low value resistor to introduce a high load across the battery which causes several hundred Amps to flow for a short time. During this time the voltage is monitored and the rate and amount the voltage falls indicates the health of the battery.

There's a number of good reasons the test is kept to a short duration, namely when there's a circuit with 600 Amps flowing, which is ten times the current a household DB is capable of, things get hot very quickly. It's running the battery very briefly beyond its normal duty and can cause internal damage to the battery if it continues too long... not to mention the battery may start emitting acid in vapour or liquid form and other dangerous gasses. The internal resistor in the tester effectively will be a 7.2kW heater during the test of a 12 volt battery at 600 Amps. It's going to get hot and very quickly.

As testers go this thing is a real grunt. I don't mean that in a bad way as such, it's just a hand operated, analogue tester with no frills and no built in intelligence. That said I'd also warn there's also no built in safety either; there's no protection to prevent damage from reverse connecting, no protection to prevent damage due to excessive test time or over-enthusiastic test currents, no internal or external fuses etc so it's only suitable for use by a trained person with appropriate PPE and unfortunately no warnings are given about this.

The only info I received with mine was on the foil sticker on the front of the tester. There was no instruction or user manual included although I managed to download the basic instructions (same as the instructions on the sticker) from the manufacturers website. It just arrived in a plain brown cardboard box with no branding whatsoever and no internal baffling or cushioning to prevent transit damage which was also a bit disappointing.

Combine all of the above with a slightly skew 12V/6V sticker and a casing screw that was obviously protruding and not tight ......overall first impressions weren't great but it was all small things that could have been much improved by some minor attention to detail.