Just for information of people considering a jump start box or jumper leads. Yesterday I bought the attached Jump Start box and it has been successfully starting my dead 2000 HSE no problems. (She was dead due to a BeCM not sleeping issue from 433mhz EMR issues (until I disconnected the RF receiver)).
I was too scared to get the 600 AMP unit, so I got the 900, but 1100, 1300 and 1900 also existed. I am surprised how well this relatively small unit has been working.
The one I got also has USB charger and 12v cigarette lighter and also a built in air compressor!
Has anyone used one of these as an alternative to an auxilary battery setup?? I would imagine you can charge it via cigarette socket as well? Would come in handy instead of the worry about fitting and wiring the second one up!
Yep I have the 1900amp one use it for charging phones and dvd player run the led lights when camping recharge thru the cig lighter socket or i have a 50watt solar panel and with that it has lasted 2 weeks and still had charge wouldnt run a fridge off it for long though
If you want to run a fridge its probably no good but for everything else no problems just top through the lighter plug when you need. The instructions with mine said it would fully charge off the lighter in 3 hrs dont know about that but if i charge directly off the battery with the jump start clamps it charges very quick
I was told by a person quite a while ago that if you plug your fridge into the your j/s box and then plug that into your power supply (ignition dependent) the cars power will run the fridge through the j/s box, when you turn off the ignition the fridge will suck it's power from the j/s box. When you start the car again the cars power will recharge the j/s box and at the same time run the fridge, this would in my case negate the need for a 2nd battery. I only use the Euro style plugs and connectors not cigar lighters, any thoughts on using it in this manner, good or otherwise.
I don't know what sort of battery those jump start boxes use - but, as slug burner has said, the amp hours of the battery is important - for more than one reason. A typical 'start' type battery suffers and can be damaged if you discharge it to 90% or less, even a 'deep cycle' battery shouldn't be discharged below 50% and below 20% it will be damaged. AGM batteries (optima, odyssey etc) suffer less in this regard, but still suffer from frequent low discharging.
So if amp hours (ah) of the battery were only 10ah say (small battery), then using it for more than 1ah will start to damage it if it's a start battery - or 5ah for a deep cycle. Not very long in either case.... Fridge current draw varies a lot - a danfoss type might draw 1-3amps/hour whereas a thermoeletric type can draw over 10amps/hour.
The one jump start box I've looked at was a 900amp unit - that's peak amps, it had a crank amp rating of only 300cca.... and it's capacity was 17ah, enough to run a danfoss fridge for about 8-12 hours or a thermoelectric for about 2 hours before it's completely 100% flat. I'm fairly sure it was a cheap 'start' battery also, so it really wouldn't like being run flat.
If you treat the jump start box as a disposable item then there's no problem - but if you want it to last and still have the ability to actually jump start a vehicle then it'd be worth treating it well. It'll start losing crank amps as it suffers damage.
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