I didn’t do much with my ZKE EBC-A05 battery tester last week while I waited for a cheap, small used PC to arrive to run the EB Test software for long-term tests.

The computer came earlier this week, and after getting Windows patched up, I set up a test to run overnight that would cycle between charging to 4.3v and 0.12A, pausing, discharging at 2.4A to 2.75v, waiting 10 minutes for the cell to cool down, and then repeating the cycle.

When I checked on the progress this morning, everything looked good at first glance.

Upon closer inspection though, I noticed that after the first charging cycle proceeded until 4.3v but terminated prematurely, at  0.25A current, and subsequent cycles cut of prematurely, at ~0.5A.

I tried stopping the test and restarting it again, and found that this time, the first charging cycle terminated at 0.5A.

I’ve powercycled the EBC-A05 and started a new testing cycle. So far, so good, the first charging cycle terminated at 0.12A, as desired. We’ll see if that holds for subsequent cycles.

I must say though, the fact that I’ve had this problem once makes me less enthusiastic about this device.  I was thinking of buying another 3, so I could run duplicate control and experimental runs of multi-day experiments at a time, but that only makes sense if these things are generally reliable.