instructions

Operation

The charger has two LED lights with the following pattern:

Charge green, Power green: Plugged into mains/Trickle Charge at end of charge.

Charge red, Power green: Battery charging.

Charge red, Power red: Battery discharging.

To commence discharging, hold down the red discharge button for 5 seconds. An internal cooling fan will be heard to start up and will run for the whole duration of discharging. Discharging or charging can be stopped or started at any time, there's none of the problems the Panasonic chargers have exhibited in this respect. When discharge is completed, the charger starts charging with the fan switched off and fully recharges the battery. At the end of charging, the charger provides a trickle charge of up to 200 mAh to offset the natural NiMh discharge of 1% per day. The charger can charge any Twist battery up to 15 Ah if ever such a large size is developed.

Connections

Below are the various connection methods available. There can be a variation in the colour of the sensor wire in US and UK chargers, but the brown positive and blue negative wires remain the same. In cases of difficulty, please contact me for advice.

On the right you'll see the connections from the new charger lead if soldered directly to the rear of the existing Giant/Panasonic socket. You can just cut off the screw fastened NTC connector supplied. In practice the two linked pins indicated can be directly soldered together with the blue lead attached. This is the neutral connection with the neutral return of the battery's temperature sensor. The green wire is the other sensor lead, and the brown is the conventional positive.

If you cannot solder the plug onto the charger lead and don't know anyone who can do it for you, all is not lost if you can wire a plug. At your local DIY in the electrical section, you should see some plastic connector strip like that on the right. Buy that and cut off a section of three connectors, it's easy to cut the separators with a small hacksaw or craft knife.

Bare the outer and strip the insulation from the wires of both the black charger lead and the grey original lead that connects to the battery. Strip enough insulation from the original wire for you to twist the wire strands together and fold them back to double the thickness. Undo the screws in the connector strip and fasten in the leads as shown, making absolutely sure that the connections are well made, especially the green and white wires. Remember, the green wire may be yellow instead on some chargers.

Now thoroughly bind this whole connection with PVC insulating tape like that shown on the right. You can also get this from your DIY. Make sure that the binding end to end is sound and try to form a continuous tapered sheath between the two outer cables to prevent any pulling apart.

Thanks to the diligent detective work of Sparky5, a pedelecs forum member, we now know what this this non standard DIN style socket is. It's produced by Hirose of Japan and it's available as RPC2-12P-7S. A Google search on this number will show various US sources, but in the UK they are available from Farnell at Ł2.77 plus VAT. Since Farnell have a minimum Ł20 order, I've bought some for anyone to buy individually if wished at cost plus postage, Ł3.62 currently. My contact link is shown above.