Battery chargers are usually pretty straightforward. Easy to use. Not complicated. Hook it up and charge.
The Optima Digital 400 is all that and a little bit more. The Digital 400 takes charging—and more importantly, maintaining—your powersports battery to the next level. One of the best features of the Digital 400 is that it is more than a battery charger, it also helps maintain your battery. What does that mean? Simply that the Optima charger keeps your battery at peak performance, ready to power your vehicle at all times.
Optima claims the Digital 400 can recover discharged batteries that other chargers can’t.
Because of the Digital 400’s built-in battery “health mode,” you can quickly determine just what kind of charge your battery has.
For example, we have a John Deere RSX850i that sat for much of the winter. We used the vehicle a couple of times during the winter months and it never really showed any signs of hard starting due to a weak battery. However, when we hooked up the Digital 400 charger, after a couple of minutes of diagnostics, it showed the battery was at about 75 percent and needed a charge to get it back to 100 percent, which the Digital 400 automatically did. Once the battery was charged, the Digital 400 went into its “conditioning mode” which keeps the battery ready to go at 100 percent.
One more very cool feature on the Digital 400 is a 30-day storage condition mode, which helps maintain your battery while not in use or in storage. The 30-day storage recondition mode is actually the sixth of six stages the Digital 400 automatically cycles through.
Stage one is the diagnostic stage where it analyzes the battery for the state of charge. From there, the automatic modes will charge, condition and maintain the battery.
The Digital 400 features a hybrid LED battery charging gauge with LCD display that is easy to ready and, more importantly, understand. It comes with a bracket if you want to hang it or a dual-purpose hook and tilt stand. There are interchangeable battery clamps and ring terminals and spark-free connection technology. Additionally, the charger/maintainer offers reverse polarity and over temperature protection and ambient air temperature compensation during charging.
What We Like:
The Digital 400 is compact and very easy to use. All you have to do is hook the charger up and it does the rest, automatically cycling through all the modes, letting you know through the LCD display exactly what’s going on during each mode. It’s not big and bulky and that makes it easy to store as well as use near the vehicle without having to find a place to put the charger. We set it on the wheel while in use.
What We Don’t Like:
Not much. There might be one or two folks who don’t like its compact design and small LCD display but we think it’s a perfect size for a powersports vehicle. Some might also balk at the $109.99 price tag but with all the features of this unit, we think it’s a good buy.
Contact:
Optima Batteries www.optimabatteries.com.
