On Bescor and batteries

T

tduncan

Active member
I recently went with a Frezzi mini-fill XLR and started with a Bescor MM 12-XLR, the shoulder bag. My thinking is I would rather have a couple of smaller lighter batteries rather than one large heavy belt. Easier to deal with and offers redundancy. Does this jive with your experience in the field?

Bescor instructs to never completely discharge the battery, then fully charge but DO NOT ever overcharge. This appears to be a strict warning. They suggest calculating charge time by taking the amount of time to discharge and double it for charge time.

Question is: Doesn't the time to discharge depend on the amount of power being drawn? If I operate at 75w full it would be twice as fast as if I dim to 50% or approx 35w, correct? How can I use the suggested calc time if there is no constant involved? Or does the light draw the same current when dimmed at 50%?

This doesn't seem to be a very clear process for such a critical issue. What constitutes "over charging"? 1 hour or 24 hours? Or is it not really that critical? What is your experience with Bescor battery life and care?

thanks,
Tom
 
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Just completed my second test. The battery lasted approx. 2 hours at 50% and exactly 1 hour at 100%, so I think this answers that question.

Does this mean that it should be fully charged in 2 hours? I let it charge last night for 4 hours, was that too much?

One thing that makes absolutely no sense is the "manual" say it should take 13 HOURS to charge?!?!?!
 
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I would not pay much attention to the instruction that you quoted, as they make no sense. The free wall chargers that they normally include, are slow overnight chargers, taking more than 10 hours to charge, depending on the battery capacity. They also offer "automatic" chargers, that are supposed to turn off at the end of charge. Anyway, the Lead Acid batteries that they make are very forgiving, you would not damage them by extra hour or two of charging. The battery will start getting warm to the touch as it get full.
HTH
 
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