A Review of the Schumacher SE-1-12S Onboard Battery Charger

I know I changed this blog to be about things that are in my home rather than just random blogging. So, here's a review of the Schumacher SE-1-12S Fully Automatic Onboard Battery Charger - 1.5 Amps. I figure, my garage is part of my home and this is in my garage, so there you go. Here's a picture of it:



Anyway, I bought this back in April 2010 because I barely drive my car anywhere anymore, so my battery loses its charge often. Instead of having to buy a new car battery all the time, I thought I'd save myself some money and get myself a charger instead.

I found this on Amazon (waited a bit until the price went down to about $21.99) and decided to go for an onboard one because I figured I'd mount it somewhere under my hood and plug my car in when it needed charging. Well, I ended up not doing that because I have no clue where I can even fit the thing. Anywhere near my car's battery isn't gonna work because there's no room, but it kind of has to be close to the battery because the leads are so short. So, I use it unmounted and just have it sitting on top of my headlight when I have it plugged in.

I should have gotten just a normal charger with alligator style clamps instead... it'd be a whole lot easier than using the Schumacher in the way that I ended up using it. I'll probably pick up the Centech float charger for $4.99 from Harbor Freight (it gets pretty decent reviews) if they ever get the things in stock at my local store. They always seem to have the coupons for it, but the chargers are never on the shelves - probably because they want you to spend your money on something else. Since those are always out of stock, maybe I'll just forget about Harbor Freight and spend a little more on a Battery Tender 021-0123 Battery Tender Junior 12V Battery Charger - that one seems to have a nice long cord for my purposes and excellent reviews.

Anyway, as for the Schumacher charger itself, I've only had to use it twice since I bought it, but it's revived my battery nicely each time. It is sort of a hassle to get the leads connected to my battery each time since I don't have it mounted, but other than that, it works very well. It does make kind of a humming noise when it's charging, but since it's in the garage I don't really care and can't hear it when I'm not in the garage anyway.

The power cord on the charger itself is really short, so I have to get out an extension cord every time I need to use it. But that's really its intended design. It shouldn't have a long cord because it is meant to be mounted, so you wouldn't want to have it under your hood with the power cable dragging underneath your car as you drive it.

If you're looking for an onboard charger/maintainer that does what it's supposed to do, then this is a good choice. Just make sure that there's actually a place where you can mount it that's somewhat close to the battery itself.

If you're not really sure if you have a place it can be mounted or want something that's easier to connect and disconnect from your battery (if you plan on using it just every once in a while or for more than one car), then go with a charger that has clamps instead of ring terminals.

If I ever do end up buying a different charger, I'll make a post about that too.

Things aren't built to last these days...

Wow, things really aren't built to last as long as they used to. So far in the past month we've either replaced or repaired our TV (a Samsung LN46A650), our Microwave (a Panasonic NNSA647B), and our water heater.

We've had the TV for about two years, but it started doing this thing where when you turn it on, it would turn itself off and on a few times before ever showing any audio or video. At first it'd turn off/on about once or twice, but gradually got worse... I counted as much as 13 times once of it shutting itself off and coming back on again, but I'm sure there was a time when it did it even more, I just got tired of counting. Good thing we paid for the extended warranty from Fry's when we bought it, so we were able to get it fixed for free.

Our microwave was about three years old and then one day I noticed it wouldn't heat anything at all. A few days later, it would give an H97 error message. We ended up just buying a new one. Our previous microwave before the Panasonic lasted probably about 27 years... and still worked when we got rid of it, but just took longer to heat things up.

I'm not sure what was wrong with our water heater. It was leaking or something, but we got that fixed too.

Seems like something else will fall apart soon too - our washing machine. It is terribly loud and sounds like a jet about to take off. It wasn't so loud just a few months ago. We haven't had this washer and dryer for very long, probably just about three years as well. The dryer already had to be repaired after about a year because it made this loud banging noise and now it looks like the washer will have to get fixed next. Our previous washer and dryer probably lasted about 25+ years as well.

Just seems like things these days just aren't built as well as they used to be.

10/10/10!

I was planning on posting this at 10:10, but I wanted to update at a bunch of other places too, so I'm picking the one (probably Facebook or Twitter) where I'd want it to be.

Of course, maybe I can set up something to post automatically to ping.fm that'll go everywhere simultaneously, but nah. Anyway, happy 10/10/10, everybody!

Our grass is dying!

Well, a while back we fired our gardener, bought an electric mower and started mowing the lawn ourselves, but now our grass is dying! I have no idea how our neighbors can keep their grass alive with the watering restrictions they set for our neighborhood... my mom thinks the neighbors are cheating a little.

Or maybe our sprinklers are busted... it happens from time to time, I don't really pay any attention to them when they come on.

Maybe it's time for an alternative to grass. Pebbles, maybe? Artificial turf? Hmm.

How do you keep your room cool?

It's summer once again and here in So Cal, it can get into the 100s of degrees Fahrenheit. Thankfully, we haven't had very many of those days this summer, but it has started to heat up.

My room always seems to get and stay incredibly hot, even if it's already cool outside. Opening the window doesn't help much. I've already turned off and unplugged two of the laptops in my room, my Xbox 360, some external hard drives, and a few other electronic devices, but that didn't seem to make things any cooler either, even though they've all been off/unplugged for about 3 or 4 days now.

After that, I've tried leaving my door open and having the fan oscillate the air around. Running the air conditioner for the entire house would be too expensive.

Before anyone suggests putting in a window air conditioner, my window isn't the kind that could be used with one of those, so that option wouldn't work too well for me. And those other portable air conditioners are too expensive. I could probably try one of those DIY air conditioners, but buying one would probably work immensly better than wasting a bunch of money on parts to build one myself.

Anybody have inexpensive yet effective ways of keeping your room cool? I'd love to hear any ideas.

9/9/09!

I just wanted to make a post for today. Not much has been going on with my home, no construction, no new furniture, or anything like that.

It was extremely hot last month, but has cooled down this month. Really nice weather today for 9/9/09. I think next year for the summer months we should install some sort of solar powered air conditioner. I mean it only makes perfect sense to have something like that. Use the sun's own energy to cool our house. Seems like an awesome idea to me. And something that Toyota has already implemented into their new Prius, which is just pure genius.

Anyway, nothing much to report. Just wanted to wish everyone a happy 9/9/09!

New gate for the new fence!

Our fence was put up last month, woohoo! We probably won't live here the next time the fence needs replacing, but who knows?

I'll have to find the pictures I took, which wasn't very many. Didn't really feel like taking pictures like I did when they put in the new floors.

Anyway, we've got some friends putting in a new gate. We told the people who were putting up our new fence that we wanted to keep our old gate. So they did that, but now we're putting in a completely different style of gate. It's like a swinging door style, but it doesn't look like saloon doors.

I'll have to take some pictures of it once it's put in.