Best Charger In The World

The La Crosse Technology BC1000 battery charger is the world's best battery charger. Period. 

You don't have to use all the chargers in the world to come to this conclusion. I haven't. But if you look up the market for such products there is simply no other charger that does so many things and offers so much information about your battery and the charging process. And once you use them you realise that this charger does the work pretty well.

I have been using it for the last seven months or so and discharged/charged at least 10/15 times. Enough to give me some idea about what this charger is all about and somewhat qualifies me to write a review for non-technical people. 

First of all, the charger comes with four AA and four AAA rechargeable batteries. It also has a very detailed user manual that makes the job of using this sophisticated piece of electronics easy to use. Then there are these plastic adapters with which you can convert your pencil batteries into size C or D batteries to go into your larger gadgets. And all this come packed in a smart polyester sling bag that is ideal for traveling. 

So what's so special about this charger? Well, it charges your battery after discharging it completely, which is what sets it apart from the other vanilla chargers. When your battery is completely discharged and won't work to run your gadget you think it has zero charge in it. Right? Wrong. There is still some charge left in it. Ideally this should also be drained out to make the next charging process complete. When your charger has the ability to slowly discharge your battery it ensures this deletion of memory. Of course this discharge and charging process takes some time, typically overnight at 200 mA. But if you can afford the time then that's the best way to charge your battery because it ensures optimum capacity utilisation and extends the life of the battery. 

I do this as a standard practice for all my recharges at home. Earlier, using my vanilla Sony chargers I would insert freshly charged battery into the bluetooth keyboard and the computer would tell me they are 70 per cent charged. Now I get 100 per cent. 

To understand this in better detail I suggest read up on memory effect in rechargeable batteries. Google is free. 

The charging unit has various modes. At the most basic level it can just charge your battery. But even that it does in style. If you are in a real hurry you can charge an AA battery at 1800 mA and it takes just 80 minutes. But this you do only when you are in a real hurry. Otherwise you use the 200 mA charging current mode which takes about 13 hours. Between 200 mA and 1800 mA there are various other charging current that you can select, if you want to. 

For AAA just three charging currents are available that is 200, 500 and 700 mA. 

There is a "refresh" mode which helps you revive long unused rechargeable batteries. This is done by repeatedly and automatically discharging and recharging your battery for upto 20 times. It can take several days to complete the entire procedure but then you wouldn't mind that if you could revive a long dead, old battery. There is a small catch here. If your battery was lying around for a very long time, it will need to be charged a little using your old charger. This unit cannot use any battery that has literally zero charge in it (below 0.9v to be precise). If you put such a battery it will show "null". 

Another beauty of this charger is that it will never overcharge the battery. Once the battery is fully charged you are expected to disconnect it. If however, you don't, it goes into a trickle charge mode. It also has an automatic cut off system in case there is overheating of the batteries. 

Among other standard features that ordinary charging units don't have, you can charge just one battery on this. You can simultaneouosly do four different things to four different batteries on this charger.

While the batteries are being charged the unit can give you various information about the process like the voltage in the batteries, the time elapsed etc. 

The bottomline is, it is a bloody sophisticated piece of electronics and stretches the definition of a battery charger to way beyond what you thought they were supposed to do. Expensive? Yes it is not cheap by our standards. I think I spent Rs 3500. But I think it is really worth it. I use many rechargeable batteries (flash gun, GPS, shaving razor, TV remotes, key board, mouse, sound recorders, flash light, blood pressure monitoring machine - the list is getting longer every day) and I have close to 30 rechargeable batteries. A good charger certainly helps.

Conclusion: If you are a power user of rechargeable batteries serious about their long term health and want to extract the maximum from your batteries then nothing beats this machine. Just close your eyes and buy it if you can afford. They are certainly worth it. In India Amazon sells this. But the price is rather prohibitive. I had it brought over from Canada. 

Photo Courtesy: Amazon India and the company's website.