Schumacher SpeedCharge 6500A Battery Charger
The Schumacher SpeedCharge 6500A Battery Charger is a full battery charger and starter with testing functions and fully microprocessor controlled for easy to use and foolproof battery charging.
Ease of Use, Performance: 22/25
Look & Feel: 24/25
Features 23/25
How much I enjoy 25/25
Total: 94/100
The Schumacher SpeedCharge 6500A Battery Charger is a great battery charger, car starter and tester for your one stop battery service device. The SpeedCharge battery charger is a full battery charger and slow charger for car and smaller batteries such as snowmobiles, motorcycles and lawn tractors.
You can also start cars using the built in and safety proof starting function that allows you to temporarily boost the amperage and try to start your vehicle. The temporary nature of the boost allows you to safely try to start your car while preventing damage to the starter itself from overdrawing current and burning out the starter.
The Schumacher battery charger is a smaller charger but has plenty of power for charging batteries with a slow charge at 2 amps and a regular charge at 10 to 20 amps. The 65 amp starter function is a very temporary function that has a built in safety off device to allow a start charge for 5 seconds.
If the car does not start the charger will go into a mandatory power off state and a counter will start to count down 3 minutes before you can use the charger again. This is a safety feature that makes sure you do not overheat the charger and ruin the device so you should not bypass this feature.
You can just unplug the charger but you could quite easily burn out the charger and fry internal components so I do not recommend this at all. Although I did figure out you could unplug and get rid of the countdown I also waited a few minutes before trying it again as I did not want to burn out my review sample.
I only wanted to see how well the device worked and how the countdown timer functions for use as a safety device and like many safety devices you can usually find a way around them, but don’t. This charger works well and has a lot of good safety features you should follow starting with reading the manual that comes with the 6500A charger and following it.
The charger works great as a regular or smaller battery charger with easy to use front panel buttons all controlled by a micro processor. To connect the battery to the charger use the large clamps and place them on the appropriate positive terminal and a negative part of the frame of your car then plug in the two prong power cord.
To charge the battery using the regular charging simply plug in the charger and observe that the charger shows it is connected to the battery and the battery is functioning normally according to the display. The charger features a tester that functions automatically by showing battery strength when connected to a battery system and alternator strength when the vehicle is running.
The tester can check a battery as well as an alternator to give a good idea if the battery is working and taking a charge and if an alternator is working as it should. This is not a precise tester but a good one for a decent indication if the battery or alternator may be at fault for further testing.