Problem charging in my car - what did I do wrong??

[Nubiwan]

Hey Vets,

I have been using the 12 volt cigarette lighter socket with a dual usb adapter for over half a year.

About a month ago, I took off on a 24 day driving vacation and a few days later I began to smell a plastic burning smell in the car. NEVER considered that it could be my charging setup but of course that's what it turned out to be.

Here's what I did, I usually used a Belkin 4-outlet 'spider' to charge my phone, 1 or 2 ego batteries and occasionally the charger that came with my Provari - all this with no problem. The Belkin unit is the one I carry with me at all times - home or hotel.
Somewhere in the 1st week, I rushed out of a motel room and just plugged the Belkin spider into a Walmart spider (instead of plugging it directly into the 12-volt adapter) - basically daisy-chaining 2 "extension cords" together. I suspect this is when plastic began to melt.

Last weekend, I was out of town - got a hotel room - plugged my usb connector from the Belkin unit into my laptop and got a message saying something like "Hey Dummy, you're trying to pull too much power from this little 5-volt supply!".
Huh? No problem - I thought, I will just plug in one of the joyetech wall units and work from there. NOPE. I tried charging a Spinner and it stopped working (no light at all). I went ahead and tried my favorite Twist and the same thing happened. That was the first time it dawned on me that something was screwed up with my charging setup.

Yesterday, I got around to trying to isolate the problem. Fortunately, the two batteries I'd 'killed' seem to charge just fine when directly connected to my home pc. I tried both usb spiders to try charging an unused 510 battery by plugging them into a usb port on my pc - same one that worked to revive the ego-type batteries - and guess what? Both usb spiders began to melt!

I would appreciate it if you can lay some knowledge on me about where I went wrong. Was it buying from Walmart? Is there an upper limit to the power available via the lighter socket on a VW Golf? Obviously, I have to dump every component from the socket adapter and the 2 multiple outlet usb spiders -but, should I be looking further - like, something wrong with the car?
BTW - my next thought is to use the 120-volt outlet in the trunk - see any issues with that?
TIA - Warning don't charge like me brother!

 

[burns_erin]

When it comes to electrical adaptors, less tends to be more. Definitely don't daisy chain, I suspect you are right and thats what caused the initial trouble. And if you bought a name brand, even from Walmart I doubt we can lay the blame on them. Also, I wouldn't charge more than one item through a port at a time. That seems to be where I've had most of my issues. My dad the genius electrical person could explain better, but I'll give you what he gave me, ":smack: Are you trying to set your car on fire? What's more important to you, keeping a 20 dollar battery charged or thousands to fix your cars electrical system if you seriously short something out." That was followed up with a long explanation of exactly what I needed to do if I wanted to keep charging things in my car like that including running new/different/better wiring. And then a trip under the hood of his truck to he could show me how he had it setup to safely charge his work equipment. The thing to remember is that car electrical systems weren't designed for this sort of behavior, it isn't like your homes wiring.

I doubt your cars electrical system is the problem, though there is a way to test those cigarette lighters for correct metering, I'm not entirely sure how, but you may want to look into that. If you are talking about further on down the line in your electrical system, usually electrical problems will throw a code and you will see your check light come on. If it doesn't come on but theres a problem, then sometimes if there is a problem that the battery will seem to stop charging enough. I had a short once from charging a cordless drill in my car and nothing coded, but my car battery wouldn't stay charged because some problem was caused in the charging system.

If you need to charge more than one thing, I would suggest verifying your cigarette lighter and the one in the trunk run off separate circuits, and charging one thing at a time in each. I'm not sure if you were asking a question on the charging from the trunk thing, but in general it isn't recommended to charge unsupervised. However if you are going to do it, you may want to get one of those safe charging bags and always remember to disconnect the charger and the battery from the power source in your trunk. You certainly don't want to leave that long term in the trunk, especially when weather heats up.