batterychargingmonitor

Battery Charging Monitor

Is Your Charging System Working?

This is another Accidental Project. The Battery Not Charging indicator on my lawn/garden tractor recently failed. The old charge light controller was an epoxy encapsulated unit that could not be reverse engineered because it went up in smoke.

In watching the battery voltage in an idle state (engine not running) versus charging state (engine running) I noticed a small increase in voltage when the battery was being charged. This led to thoughts about using some sort of comparator circuit to indicate when the battery was below some threshold voltage. If the threshold were adjustable I should be able to set it so that the BATTERY lamp could be illuminated whenever the battery was not being charged.

The diagram to the right is a first attempt at this Battery Minder circuit.