EG4 Chargeverter - GC review | 48V 100A Battery Charger 5120W Output | 240/120V

instruction manual Quick Connect cables with ring terminals on one side mounting brackets and screws quick connect 240 lock power cable communications cable and dry contacts cable hey what's guys back to the chain one this episode we're going to go take a look at the new charge brother from eg4 this one right here the Black Edition or the Gen 2 or the GC or which stands for generator connected uh but anyways the point is the new one they sell right now as of this moment which is this black one okay so the yellow one here is the original charge ver and for me it doesn't have any problems but you know there have been some people who've had problems um after uh in shipping or let's just say so they got it but you know not any problems after they had it working at least none that I know of right so there is no charge here the yellow one you know sometimes the power supplies inside would have been disconnected or whatnot during shipping because it got jolted around uh but that was an easy fix you just slide them back in uh glue it down I think after they figured that out they initially started gluing uh the power supplies inside down so that they wouldn't get you know disconnected or whatnot and shipping but anyways the newer one has a lot of improvements besides just that and has a lot more features so if you want to know more about the charge vers in general or more about this one stick with us all right so let's start by why you would even want to get a charge verter in general okay so most people are going to say well you don't need a charge verter because these all-in-one inverters can or can charge the batteries they have Chargers built in okay uh there's a few reasons why you still may want one um even though let's just say the 3,000 evh to 6,000 xp2 keep all of these can charge uh some of them cannot charge at the same uh wattage or amperage that these can charge at also in order to have if you want to do a truly like grid off situation you don't want to have the grid connected to them then you can have the grid connected to these and then still kind of be off grid right if that even makes sense uh so those are the primary reasons but the other reason is um the generators that you would use to connect to your all-in-one inverters may put out dirty power right so most people in the generator industry knows that there's only a certain Sweet Spot within that generator where it runs where it puts out clean power right so depending on how much you're running that generator it may actually be putting out dirty power to your inverter or AKA decreasing the life of your inverter and also causing failure problems right so these would can take in a lot of the dirty AC power and still clean it up a little bit and put it into DC or AC power put it to DC to charge the uh batteries but the way that the inverter Chargers work is that they releas The High Frequency uh circuit in Reverse right to charge the batteries and because they're doing that they're going to be a lot more sensitive uh to failure to for that reason right and that's kind of why a lot of the generator industry started pushing inverter generators because it takes the dirty AC power sends it to DC right and then sends it from DC back to clean AC using an inverter right that's generally how inverter generators work in general right uh but the point is that uh these will be a lot better at doing that and also being able to charge faster a lot more controls and other features right so it's a dedicated system you can put it some somewhere else if it's too noisy all kinds of stuff so let's get into some of the biggest differences here okay first of all like I said the biggest difference is obviously the color it's easy to see uh the other thing you can see real quick is that all of the connections to the Black version or the GC one is uh Quick Connect so you can pull these off right I'm not going to pull it off because it's still connected right now to power so you can you know disconnect it here the battery connections on this side is also quick disconnect it's going to be infile style right because you can just hit the button and pull disconnect whereas on the yellow one all of these are hardwired or you know built in with these Nubs and the protector so you can't really make it mobile right so also on the black one um the mounting brackets are independent meaning you have to mount the mounting brackets to the device and then you have to mount the device to wherever you're going to mount it at uh but for some reason if you're just going to put it on the ground or you didn't want these things sticking out for your application then you know you don't need to use those brackets on the yellow one you do have to use those brackets cuz it's built in as a physical part of the shell of this device okay so um those are immediate differences off the back uh the other uh huge differences are really going to be the black one is GC right what does that mean generator connected generator control what whatever you want to call it right but they do include dry contacts here um on this side or the cables for the dry contacts on this side you could plug in to connect your generator up to so you can control your generator to start up and start charging when you need it to okay that's one the other big thing is it does include a uh connection Communications cable so this yellow cable here this ethernet looking cable um you can connect from this to your batteries that assuming has a protocol supported and control when they start charging okay so what I mean by that is that this is really more of a smarter device versus this one which is a dumb device this one doesn't have generator connected capability and it doesn't have the uh Communications capability this is really just a you set at what voltage you want to charge and you just start charging it with how many amps right this one you can do all of that right but you can also use the state of charge to start charging and discharging and you can also like I mentioned earlier tell the generator to kick on and start charging this one you cannot do that okay so both of these will work on 240 you can also run each of these on uh 120 but you're only going to get R roughly about half the amperage or capacity right so about 45 amps you'll probably be able to get uh for some reason if you're if you at 208 voltage right you could run this one too uh but you won't obviously get the uh full 100 amps so let's get into it so this right here is the charger and this right here is the AC connection as you can see right here has a unlock and lock uh for you know after you cut it on you want to be able to to twist it up to pull it off but we're go ahead and going to get it connected to the grid right so we're going to go ahead and line this up put this here push it in look at that and then you are connected okay so uh the unconnected you would just twist this up and then pull it off I'm not going to go ahead and do that since it's booting up uh the right side like I said is quick infel style connectors and you're going to be pretty good there you know if you're going to move it a lot you probably want to you know not mess with it too much but um what I'm going to say is you don't want to be disconnecting and connecting this stuff while it's under load that's that's a huge note so don't do that okay so as you can see here as it Powers up it'll say charge verter and it'll tell you the voltage and the current that is charging at and the state of charge that you're going to be getting okay so in order for that function to work you need to connect this uh cable to connect the comms from here to your battery right and then it you can get the state of charge indic here showing up okay but in order to do that you have to have the host battery connected to this and that's going to be a problem for some people mainly because the host battery can only really be connected to as either the inverter right or the charge verter so you have to figure out if you want to use the battery coms for the inverter or the charge verter I would imagine most people would use it for the inverter okay but for some reason you wanted to use it for the charger you can go ahead and do that okay the best compromise that I've seen people do or at least uh that I've tried uh once in my opinion is that you if you have a bank of like six batteries just have four of them or five of them connected to the inverter right as for comms and then just connect one of them to this one as the host battery right but because all the batteries are going to be connected at one point it's going to be accurate enough for you to get uh let's just say a good accurate state of charge uh reading and also on that battery rank so I would say that's probably the best compromise if you were going to do that but anyways let's get into it okay that's why this thing right here says loss for state of charge okay so moving into it you hit the enter button um here you'll see the voltage right um and then you'll see the state of charge and you'll see battery start current state of charge stop and Battery stop what this means is this is the battery or the voltage that it's going to be charging the battery once the charging happens the state of charge start means when the battery bank or whatever you're connected to is uh uh under this threshold is going to start charging the battery or reaches the threshold right so if you're at 81 and then you're using it and it dropped to 80 it'll go ahead and start charging the battery right and then that's what state of charge stop means so when it gets to uh let's just say in this case 100% it'll stop charging the battery automatically you don't have to come here hit the breaker any of that it'll just go ahead and start doing that okay uh battery start is when uh the battery will start charging right and the battery stop is at what voltage the battery will stop charging okay so uh these are diff are independent right so you would be either using this function or this function um independently right the way you would want it to work you can technically use a combination of of both but it's going to get a little bit complex and I would not recommend you do that mainly because uh the state of charge setting uh will really start messing with you if if you get a lot of state of chart or S so drift which does happen quite a bit so you know I would just stick to one or the other and I would like I said in my experience I've mainly been using um the battery start voltage and the battery stop voltage okay uh the current here is the current at you at which you are going to be charging the battery so right now it's at 10 but if I go to it right let's just go to it right here hit enter to go into that setting and then step it up so this right here means that when it starts charging it's going to charge at 54 volts and it's going to charge at 100 amps okay so if I were to get out of here uh you just hit the escape button and it'll go back and then it'll go ahead back to this screen okay so uh when you're at this screen um it's really just going to tell you the status of what's currently going on nothing will actually start happening or anything like that until you hit this breaker right so this breaker is what really activates or really allows the current and stuff like that to flow and this right here you can see is 125 amp breaker so let's go ahead right now since it is connected to AC and also the battery bank here flip that switch and you'll see it will go ahead and start charging right now you can see it's uh 23 amps it's Stepping Up 2 4 amps it may not get to 100 amps because this battery bank is pretty full right now um so we'll see how much it'll actually charge at but in my experience um I've seen this charge at close to about 98.