Saturday, May 06, 2017

Mobile phone not charging in car, or from 12V battery, using USB cigarette plug charger. Nonda ZUS solves the problem.

A while ago I purchased an inexpensive Huawei mobile phone. It's not a bad unit. If does have some quirks, but for the low price of under $100 on special at Coles, it does most of what I need from a mobile phone and it has an excellent large screen.

However, when I went to charge the Huawei using the car charger, after driving for half an hour or more, I'd notice the battery charge had hardly changed, if at all. I also have 12V batteries set up I charge from a stand-alone solar power system, and plugging the Huawei mobile into USB car chargers, it was the same. A very slow charge rate.

A friend also mentioned they needed to take an inverter with them camping as they now couldn't charge their mobile phone direct from the USB car charger.

The USB car chargers I have are rated at 2.1A so I can't see why the don't charge. When I test the current I can see the current is from 0.2-0.5A, so there's little wonder the mobile phones are taking so long to charge.

At a recent technology exhibition, I was speaking to a Nonda representative and asked if he'd noticed the problem. Nonda have a range of smart car products, one of which is the Nonda ZUS, is a dual USB car charger, that is a smart unit monitoring the battery and allows people to find where they've left their car. The Nonda ZUS had two 2.4A USB sockets conveniently angled and able to plug in USB cables in any direction. The Nonda representative hadn't found any such problem. In fact he generously offered me a unit to test his equipment.



That night I took the Nonda ZUS, plugged the unit into one of my 12V batteries and then plugged in the mobile phone. At last, the Huawei mobile phone was charging as it should. Instead of taking all night, it would charge relatively quickly. The Nonda ZUS was delivering around 1A of power and it wasn't long before I started to see the battery status of the mobile phone showing it was charging.

I still don't know why my old USB cigarette car chargers charge very slowly, but at least I now know the Nonda ZUS will charge my devices.

Thank you to the Nonda representative for the opportunity to use the Nonda ZUS and also to show the problem is with my old chargers, not the batteries, cables, or mobile phones.

If others are in this situation, at least you now know there's a solution.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
IT support.

PS. If you're interested in buying the Nonda ZUS Smart Car Charger, you can find retailers for the product at https://www.nonda.co/pages/where-to-buy.

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