Care and feeding of a battery charger

[underwhelmd]

I have an Efest Luc S2 charger. Been using it for a few weeks now... like it but I have a couple questions.

It has options to charge at .5 and 1.0 and 2.0 amp. I've been using .5 and sometimes 1.0a. For our purposes on a 18650 battery, which is best?

And since the charger is not always in use, but the LCD display stays on, do you unplug your charger when not using it? Am I hurting it by leaving it on 24/7?

Thanks for any replies.

 

[gratefulbuddy]

The manual says to use 1a for 18650s and 18500s, 2a for 26650s and 0.5a for anything smaller than 18500.
I unplug the charger when not in use - don't know if it matters, just figured it cant hurt to have it unplugged.

 

[underwhelmd]

Thank you.

 

[Ryedan]

I have an Efest Luc S2 charger. Been using it for a few weeks now... like it but I have a couple questions.

It has options to charge at .5 and 1.0 and 2.0 amp. I've been using .5 and sometimes 1.0a. For our purposes on a 18650 battery, which is best?

And since the charger is not always in use, but the LCD display stays on, do you unplug your charger when not using it? Am I hurting it by leaving it on 24/7?

Thanks for any replies.

In 18650's I have Sony VTC's, Samsung 25R's and a LG HE2. I always charge them at 0.5A unless I blow it and run out of batteries in which case I have charge one at 1A. 1A will not hurt them, but 0.5A will stress them less so they last a bit longer.

I have a few AW 18490's and a 18350 which always get charged at 0.5A. If my charger did 0.25A the 18350 would get charged at that rate.

I always pull the plug on my charger when I'm not using it even though it doesn't have a screen. I doubt it would hurt anything to leave it on, but it does use a bit of power and if something were to go wrong with it, I suppose it could become a problem if I was not here or was asleep. Doesn't cost me anything to pull the plug so I do that