CTEK CS ONE UK Review

CTEK CS ONE UK Review – Featuring Polarity-Free Clamps

If you’re regularly working on your cars or have a large garage to tend to, a battery charger is a must-have. Their core function, simply to charge and maintain your battery’s well-being, is something that a lot of folks seem to overlook or ignore when upkeeping their car. For the most part, battery chargers are rather simple devices. You plug them into a wall, and the charging brick sorts out the electricity.

At the very most, battery chargers might have special functions to recharge a dead battery. Or, it can trickle charge a battery if you’re going to be away from your car for a little while. But what if you can refine those functions into an easy-to-use, sleek, and clever car battery charger that makes the whole ordeal just that bit easier? This is an issue that CTEK may have cracked with their latest CS ONE.

Before we begin, we should first address the elephant in the room… The CTEK CS ONE is priced a little above your normal domestic car charger. Its £220 price tag might seem high, but you get a fair bit for your money. Although, having since experienced it myself, I do believe that paying more for the CTEK CS ONE is well worth the cost.

So, how could the CTEK CS ONE have the features to justify its expense? Well, for starters, it’ll make the entire process and faffing about with charging your car’s 12V battery that much easier and more effortless. This is quite handy if you’re not particularly technically minded to know how it all works.

It Makes Caring For Your Battery A Breeze

To help alleviate the complexity of charging your car’s battery, CTEK’s CS ONE debuts their innovative APTO adaptive charging mechanism. It’s a system programmed to automatically detect what type of battery your car is using. Subsequently, customising a charging profile and catering the charging rate until your battery is all charged up. Quite simply, all you need to do is connect it to your battery.

This is unlike most other car chargers, where you have to manually select different charging modes or profiles. Removing this step in the process alone is a shockingly welcomed relief. Besides that, you get other nice-to-haves that make charging a battery both easier and safer. For instance, CTEK’s CS ONE has polarity-free clamps. This is instead of specific and colour-matched positive or negative clamps.

Usually, you’d have to connect it to the corresponding positive and negative terminals on the battery. Instead, CTEK’s adaptive charging mechanism ensures that you could now connect either clamp to either battery terminal. In other words, you needn’t worry about accidentally connecting it wrong. It’s designed to automatically know which side is which and controls the electrical output to flow correctly.

This APTO tech is truly ground-breaking among car battery chargers – I certainly don’t think I’ve seen anything like it before. Other safety bonuses with the CTEK CS ONE include spark-free clamps. Hence, you don’t have to be concerned about accidental sparks should they make contact. In addition, you’d be able to connect and monitor the charging status via Bluetooth once connected to CTEK’s app.

An Abundance Of Extra Features To Play With

You will want to pair it up with your phone, as it unlocks additional functionality. In most cases, you’re able to pick and choose between varying charging modes when you’re connected through the app. For example, you can select the RECOND mode to restore and recondition an older battery. Alternatively, choosing WAKE UP may revive seemingly dead or deep-discharged batteries.

There’s also a SUPPLY mode where the CTEK CS ONE functions as a direct 12V supply from the mains. This latter profile is rather handy if you’re, for instance, working on a car but need the battery to not be discharged too significantly. That’ll be handy if you’re updating some in-car software, or perhaps you’re replacing or removing the batteries but need to keep the vehicle continuously powered.

Speaking of, the CTEK CS ONE is able to connect to both lithium-ion and lead acid batteries. Charging them up, the CS ONE could support batteries as large as 180Ah. This should encompass most regular cars out there. And, it’ll keep charging at a rate of 8.0A at 12V, which is very potent for a somewhat compact charger like this. Thus, it should handily be able to work with larger-sized batteries, too.

Operating the CTEK CS ONE is pretty straightforward, as well. All you need to do is connect the clamps to your 12V battery. Then, turn on the mains, which is what the charger is supplied by. Finally, that sleek, black brick will sort things out for you most of the time. Once you’ve initiated the charging, you might notice a countdown timer that lights up as a ring. This is basically your status indicator.

Supremely Easy To Use And Keep Check Of

It’s quite simple, informing you on how many hours worth of charging you have left before your car’s battery is full. So, there’s no need to worry about what charging cycle it’s in, like whether it’s steadily trickle charging or if it’s re-conditioning the battery. All of which otherwise sounds like a huge bunch of nonsensical jargon to anyone who’s not already knee-deep with the technical side of batteries.

Most of you won’t care what a charging cycle is anyway, so such an approach definitely makes things easier. If you don’t want to or couldn’t view the charging status (aka countdown timer) on the charger itself, you could always revert back to using the mobile app to get status updates. Otherwise, it works intelligently, with features like a temperature sensor to optimise the charging in hot and cold climates.

Beyond that, CTEK has put a lot of thought into the CS ONE’s attention to detail. A simple yet notable highlight is the rubber guards on the clamps. While they don’t look like much, it’s a useful inclusion to prevent the clamps from getting caught on the numerous wires, hoses, and pipes within your car’s engine bay. It’s a small touch to resolve so many annoyances while interacting with a battery charger.

In summary, the CTEK CS ONE is the cleverest, easiest to use, and most impactful car battery charger out there. With its many subtle features, it ensures that charging and maintaining your car’s battery doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Though it carries a high price tag, at least the CTEK includes a lengthy 5-year warranty to sweeten the deal. If you have the cash, it’s definitely worth checking out.

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