Kobalt charger malfunction

[vdotmatrix]

Battery charger comes on, display is green…..then after a few moments turns red.
Are there generic chargers out there for Kobalt?

 

[BrandonV]

Is that with no battery inserted?

Red usually indicates a bad battery.

 

[vdotmatrix]

Is that with no battery inserted?

Red usually indicates a bad battery.

That is encouraging! It is with the battery inserted.

 

[BrandonV]

That is encouraging! It is with the battery inserted.

Try with another battery. You can lookup tricks to maybe zap the old battery back to life to a level where the charger might recognize it.

 

[darkzero]

I don't have any experience with Kobalt 24v stuff but I doubt it's the charger. It's very likely the battery voltage too low so the charger recognizes it as bad. But of course your charger could be bad.

Commonly a cell or bank(s) of cells unbalanced with the rest. 24v is 24v max so nominal should be about 22v. Check the voltage of the battery pack. I don't know what Kobalt's low voltage cut off is but if the pack is in the neighborhood of 16-18v it's probably overdischargedthe
Edit: Just noticed yours is 18V so figure 13-15v or lower for being too low.

Lots of videos on youtube showing how to "jump start" a battery to bring up the voltage. I don't like the method of simply connecting another battery to the low one although it can work. I personally open up the pack, measure to find out which bank(s) is low, then charge them individually to bring up the volatge.

So far I've had 3 of my 8 yr old M18 batts had banks overdischarge just in the past year. My fault for not keeping them in rotation. After "restoring" them they've been work perfectly fine without issue. YMMV