Hi Guys,

I'm looking at getting the Ctek battery tester, however at the same price the ring rba600 analyser can be had also - which is better? CTek looks nice and easy for what I want (volt and charge checking)

And no I'm not going to go buy a simple voltmeter or multimeter instead!

Octavia Scout '11 - 2.0 Diesel CR

As a seperate quick question - is the CTek 5.0 a good home battery charger?

Cheers!

Paradigm

I've got two c-tek chargers and both have been brilliant. Their customer service is also very good. When I was building my camper they advised what I needed and didn't just try to sell me the most expensive one. Well worth emailing them with your requirements and taking some advice from them.

Skoda recommend CTek and have them on their tool supply list. You can purchase CTek chargers through your local dealer of they can find the part number.

I bought the CTEK 5 Tester/Charger and it okay, one thing that I would say though, I think for the same price, I could have bought a CTEK version that was a charger and a battery support unit in as much as it functions as a charger and can be set to just feed the battery with a voltage to allow the car ignition to be left on for longer (test) periods, ie "playing" with VCDS etc.

 

Now the reason why I am suggesting that is, from personal experience, the CTEK Tester/Charger needs something like 10.5V to be maintained at its terminals to stay "switched on", when I was running the "start power" test on a dying battery, it would just switch off during engine cranking. By a dying battery, I mean one that could still start the car if the car used every four days, but not if the car was left for eight days.

 

The reason why I bought a CTEK battery charger was that I do not need to use my Audi S4 every day, in fact a lot of the time it only gets out once a month - wife has a new Polo and I am "minding" daughter's late 2009 Ibiza 1.4 SC - so I'm not going to drag the S4 out for short and in-town journeys, so I wanted to look after the battery by using the CTEK charger, the Ibiza was having trouble with its starting if left unused for eight days, so I bought the CTEK with the test functions. After using it on the Ibiza to test the battery I realised that I should have bought a moving coil voltmeter from Maplin for the "start voltage" check and bought the CTEK version mentioned on my first paragraph.

 

I looked around pricewise and ended up buying from Halfords along with an extension lead, a rubber protective sheath and a wall mounting bracket, main reason for buying via Halfords was that I had "love to shop" vouchers going begging!

 

As said previously by others, people tend to buy the CTEK chargers because they can be trusted, and for me, that means a lot!

I know you said "don't say buy a multimeter" - but that would be a smarter buy than the tester function charger. I'm assuming here that the stand alone CTEK battery tester might perform like the built-in one. Remember that I am meaning a £15 moving coil meter here, it responds quickly to the dropping battery voltage during engine cranking, something that most DMM will not.

Edited 10 January, 201610 yr by rum4mo