Charging Your Lithium Battery

Charging Your Skyrich Lithium Battery

A useful feature of your Skyrich battery is a multi-light indicator of the battery’s state of charge:

• One light showing, signals an immediate charge is necessary.
• Two lights on signals a 50% capacity, battery is still available for cranking vehicle and a charge is not generally required.
• When three lights are on, battery is in perfect condition and ready to go.

As with all battery types, over charging and severe discharging will damage your Lithium battery too. Always check that the charging voltage is limited to a voltage below 15V but above 14V. As for the battery, you should not let the voltage at rest fall below 12.8V.

With extremely thin plates and its unique electrolyte design these batteries can be quickly charged as long as the charge voltage remains below 15V. We recommend a charging current within the range of 0.5C – 5C (where C is the capacity of the battery).

Skyrich LiFePO₄ batteries are pre-charged to 70% of capacity prior to shipping. As the lithium technology has a lower self-discharge rate than lead acid battery types these batteries can be stored for longer before re-charging is required. The state of charge is easily checked via the state of charge indication on the top of the battery – the BLUE button. If you are not going to use the motorbike for more than two weeks, then it is better to disconnect the battery completely to prevent it being over-discharged. You can use a standard maintenance (float) charger to maintain the battery for long periods.

When charging your Skyrich battery do not use a charger that has an automatic ‘de-sulphation’ or ‘conditioning’ mode as this will seriously damage or even destroy your battery.

INTELLIGENT LiFePO₄ Charger

• These types of chargers are designed for Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries so would be the advised type of charger. You would need to check all specification of the charger to make sure it is compatible with your Skyrich battery.

Normal Transformer Charger

• As long as this has a limiting Voltage Function this is fine to use with your Skyrich battery

Smart 3-Stage Charger

• This is a quality charger and features a 3-stage charge program: constant current charge, constant voltage charge and maintenance charge. This charger is suitable for charging a Skyrich Lithium battery.

Multipurpose Charger

• This charger type offers many options for the charging current. It allows for speedy charging as multiple charging rates are available. Because our lithium battery is designed with high rate performance, a 10C quick charge is acceptable, however the preferred charge rate is less than 5C. The recommend charge current can be found on the Charging label found on the battery.

Desulphation Charger – DO NOT USE WITH YOUR LITHIUM BATTERY.

• This is a professional charger which can recover sulphation in a Lead Acid battery via high-voltage charging or pulse charging. This routine will damage a lithium battery due to the high voltage charging program. Please don’t apply this kind of charger to a Skyrich lithium battery.

Key Points:

• Both vehicle and battery charger need to limit voltage between 14.0-15.0 volts when charging. The battery cannot be full charged if charging voltage less than 14.0 Volts, and the battery can be damaged if the charging voltage over 15.0 Volts.
• Always remove the battery from the vehicle before charging separately.
• Charge the battery with a lower current than the MAX Charging Current found on the charging label.
• After charging, leave the battery for 1 to 2 hours before checking the voltage. If the voltage is less than 12.4 volts, additional charging is necessary.
• If the battery becomes hot to the touch, stop charging. Allow battery to cool before resuming.

As a battery expert once remarked “Remember, batteries rarely die naturally, they are usually murdered” (name unknown).