Protek Prodigy 680 Charger
 

Having some weird quirk with the Prodigy 680 touchscreen charger from Protek. Despite it working fine for most of the few months I've owned it, recently it's started charging really slowly. Details below.

As a side activity to racing 1/8 Nitro Off-Road (where I only need a charger for receiver packs, glow ignitors, and starter box batteries), I race 1/10 Off-Road at an indoor track. I have 2 4.6Ah Turnigy Nano-Tech Ultimate shorty packs that I use. I balance charge them every time, charging at 1C. Normally after a 5 minute run the batteries are at about 3.8V per cell (this hasn't changed). Between heats there is usually about 20 minutes downtime, and my batteries used to be fully charged with a good 5 minutes to spare before my heat.

At my last outing, both packs were charging super slow, taking around 30-35 minutes to complete the charge. This meant that I had to borrow someone else's charger to charge the battery that wasn't on mine to have a full pack in time for my race. Using another charger brought the charge time back down to normal, so I doubt it's my battery packs.
When charging on my charger, the current indicator shows that it is drawing 4.6 Amps until the trickle charge state (which is normal), and yet it still takes much longer to charge than normal.


I don't know if anyone else has experienced this, it seems very strange to me. Any ideas what the problem might be? From where I see it, it looks like I might be in the market for a new charger once again, after having only owned this Protek charger for about 3 months.

What happens if you do a normal charge not a balance charge? What I suspect which happens frequently is the charger is getting "stuck" at the end of the balance charge. If the charger is down to .1a and you can see the voltages of the cells are .01v between them, it's 99.9% done.

I did try a non-balance charge once that night I believe with similar results.

The charger isn't hanging at the end of the cycle, it's actually struggling to get the voltages up it seems.

For example, with the pack starting at 3.8V per cell, it took about 15 minutes just to get up to 4.0V per cell, all the while the charger is still supposedly drawing 4.6 Amps. On a normall charge cycle it would take less than 10 minutes to reach that voltage.

Bump.