topdon BT200 - 12V/24V

Product Description TOPDON Car Battery Tester Series BT200 BT50 BT100 BT300P BT600 Review: Inexpensive, accurate and simple to use - If you are reading this you probably have concerns over the health of your battery. Maybe you have had trouble starting your vehicle or maybe you just want to be sure your battery isn’t likely to fail and leave you stranded. You want it checked but don’t want to go to a garage and pay inflated diagnostic fees or and have them tell you that you need a new battery or alternator. This device is simple to operate. Just connect to the battery terminals, red to red and black to black, and it switches on. As it switches on the Bluetooth symbol lights up (more later) and then the battery voltage appears. If you are not sure what a good voltage is there are 3 leds under “Voltage", these are “Full”, “Medium” and “Low”. So within 10 seconds you know if your battery is fully charged. Now, even a “Full” battery can have issues so you can do a “Health” test. This puts a load on the battery and checks how it performs. Hold the “Test” button for a few seconds and one of the “Health” leds will light. So within 20 seconds, with no automotive knowledge, you can get a reliable indication of your battery voltage and health. Saving you anxiety and a visit to a garage or worse, a call to the breakdown service. Now, I mentioned earlier that this also has Bluetooth capability. It can connect to an app that you download on your phone that allows you to do more testing and even lets you monitor your battery over time. If you want to check your alternator there are options in the app to do cranking tests. These are explained as you go through them. You can see from the video how easy it is to do the tests from your phone. Download the app and then connect the tester to your battery. It will then pair and you can run the tests. I did it on a Samsung 23+, so it even works on the newest phones. So, if you want an simple to use, inexpensive, battery tester, that has sufficient features to test the basic functions of your car battery, then this is a good choice. But it also has some features that allow you to do more advanced testing via a free-to-download app and an inbuilt Bluetooth connection. At this price, with these features, it makes it a great choice. Review: Excellent and simple to use, but make sure you connect it properly! - I have been wanting to try a battery tester for a while now, with four cars at home - three of which are used infrequently and on/off trickle chargers, I decided to give the BT200 a try and see how the various batteries were doing, what kind of condition they were in, and how the results compared before and after trickle charging. First up was our "daily" fitted with a Stop-Start EFB battery. This is a few years old so was interested to see what sort of health it was in. I hooked up the BT200 and it sprang to life. CCA (Cold Cranking Amps) is the test of choice so I chose to do the battery test, CCA, set the amps value (which can be found on the battery itself) and away the test went, coming back at 95% healthy and 100% charged. Not bad. Interesting as the Stop-Start function no longer works in the car and I always assumed it was because the battery was getting old...not so it would seem! A new EFB battery is around £150 so I won't be forking out for one any more knowing the battery is still in fine fettle! Onto the next car. The battery is tucked deep into the side of the boot space and very difficult to access the terminals with limited space. The croc clips on the BT200 are pretty chunky so the problem was exacerbated somewhat. I struggled to get a good connection onto the battery, and as a result the first report came back with very strange voltage readings and a 4% rating for the battery health. After fiddling with the connections a bit more I got the correct reading - 36% healthy with 0% charge - which seemed about right as the car hasn't been used for a few days and hasn't been hooked up to the trickle charger. At this point I hooked up the car to my CTEK trickle charger to test the result the next day, which I did - and the result came back with a 100% charged, 100% healthy battery! Excellent and interesting to see the change after charging. The last car to try has a relatively new battery (3-4 months old, however the car has not been driven at all in this time, and sits on a trickle charger). I was expecting this to give a perfect result - and was surprised to see just 63% health and 0% charged! Confused, I checked the charger only to find it was disconnected at the plug, I have no idea how long for! So I plugged it back in, and ran the test again the following day to find it back to 100%/100% health, excellent and again very interesting to see the change. Again though, the battery on this car is in a deep well with limited space and as before I struggled to get the chunky clips in place, having to do several tests and re-attachments before I got the correct reading. So in summary, a very neat, compact device that works well when properly attached. If you get poor results from a battery that you think is ok, do check the connections and runs additional tests just to make sure you are getting the correct results. I should stress this wasn't an issue on my main car as the battery was easy to get to with plenty of room around the clips to attach them properly. The manual does also specify that the connection should be good and the terminals clean to ensure you get accurate results. I guess I was just a little surprised at how sensitive the device was. My only disappointment is that the manual - although it looks pretty big - is only small (with multiple languages) and doesn't really go into any details of the other tests - what they are for and how they work etc. I will mainly use this for the more common CCA test, but it would be interesting to find out what the other tests are for and how I can use them. Other than that a great piece of kit, well made, nice clear backlit LCD display, and simple responsive menus. Highly recommended if you are after simple-to-use tester that doesn't cost a fortune.