CTEK MUS 4.3 Test and Charge Battery Charger Video Breakdown
Hi my name is Richard Price and I am with High-Tech Battery Solutions. Today we are going to be talking about the CTEK MUS 4.3 Test and Charge.
We have provided some notes and text covered in the tutorial video below. We hope you enjoy.
Hi this is Richard Price from High-Tech Battery Solutions and today we're going to be taking a look at the CTEK MUS 4.3 Battery Charger and the Test and Charge System. This is a brand new model from CTEK which we've gotten quite a few inquiries about this charger so we figured we would make a video and show you how to use this charger.
First we're going to explain what exactly makes this charger different compared to the rest of the CTEK models and then we're going to go into tutorials about how to actually use some of these cool features built into the charger. The 4.3 Test and Charge will still have the patented 8-step charging cycle that the original 4.3 charger has but has 3 extra bells and whistles.
The first one is going to be an actual battery test where its going to test the standing voltage of the battery, the third is going to be a starting test where you'll actually hook this charger up to the battery to start your vehicle and it will actually make sure that there is ample starting power to start the vehicle and the third and final test will be an alternator test and what this will show is actually record the voltage output of your alternator and make sure its adequate enough to charge up your battery.
How its going to do this is the three LED lights here and we're actually going to go into a short video series here and show you exactly how these work. Okay the first thing we're going to do here with the CTEK MUS 4.3 is we're going to go ahead and test out the battery mode and what the battery mode is going to do is test the preliminary voltage of the battery as its sitting and just tell you if its good or bad. What we're going to pay attention to is the three LED lights right here, Red is Bad, Yellow is Fair and green is going to be good. You will always want it to be in the green. So without connecting the power, we're going to go ahead and hook this charger up to our battery, positive to the positive post and negative directly to the negative terminal here.
Okay you're going to see the charger blink through the lights and you're going to want to hit the mode button, it will automatically go into the first setting which is the battery mode. It will blink a few more times until it lands on a solid light. In this case it is going to be green which means that our battery is fully charged. So the next test here is going to be the start power, and what this does is hook the battery charger up to the battery and then start the vehicle as quickly as you can and its going to test the actual starting power of the battery. We're going to go ahead and do that right now. Unhook it and clip it back up. Go ahead and hit the mode button again and it will switch over to the start power and then we will start the car.
Okay it looks like everything is good on that front. Okay so we did pass our start test there and the last test we're going to do here is called the alternator test and what this is going to do is check the output of the alternator and check that it is up to par so that whenever you drain this battery down every time you start your vehicle, it is going to have an adequate power to charge it back up. So we will go ahead and re-hook up the charger to the battery here and then go ahead and switch it over to the alternator mode by hitting the mode button one more time. Go ahead and start the car. You will see the light starting off in red and then it works its way up to the green and you want to give this test here about 15 seconds, once the indicator doesn't move, you want to rev the car up to about 2000 rpms that will give you the most accurate reading possible.
Okay so we just went and ran you through the three different voltage programs of the 4.3 test and charge and what we're going to do now is hook it up to this NorthStart battery and run it through the different charging combinations and algorithms that you can actually use on this charger. There is going to be a few different options here so we are going to show you what each one looks like on the LED indicator lamp and explain what each step does and how it works. Okay now that we're in the automotive setting here you're going to see the indicator panel begin to light up showing that we are going through the 8-step charging process. Now this particular setting here, the vehicle setting, is going to be used for 12 Volt flooded batteries and if we hit the mode button one more time that will bring us into the next phase in what is called the snowflake mode in which this mode in particular tis going to be meant for sealed AGM batteries like Optima, Odyssey, and NorthStar and also for colder climates so if you're charging in extremely cold weather, lets say its winter and you're storing your car long term you're going to switch it over to the snowflake mode in the automotive series.
The very last mode here is going to be called the recondition mode and what the recondition mode is meant for is to bring back life into a fully dead battery so if you have a battery that has been sitting in a vehicle for an extremely long time and it has been completely discharged, chances are that sulphation has actually built up inside the battery so you would switch it over to this recondition mode manually and what that will do is bring back and rejuvenate the battery to as much capacity as is physically possible. Another nice feature of this charger is that you can do all three modes at the same time so that if you did have a 12 Volt automotive battery that was sealed that may need the recondition mode you can select all three and it will run through the 8-step charging process. Now we only went through the automotive side, there also is as we discussed earlier the motorcycle side for the smaller batteries which will follow the same charging algorithm that we showed you there.
Stick to the video demo on this one guys...