Gammatronix Multimode Programmable Battery Monitor

One of the challenges in owning a off-road rig is battery maintenance and monitoring. For myself I tend to run a ARB fridge various HAM radios and chargers for mobile devices both at home and at camp, currently I haven’t put in a second battery to offload my devices from the main battery so I need to be concerned with my battery condition since I’m running off of a single battery and I’ve already killed one Diehard Platinum battery (thank goodness for a great warranty) by not paying attention to the load and let it discharge to far too many times.

Stock there is no way to monitor the battery charge status the voltage gauge only tells you if it’s charging and is in range. This doesn’t help to show you what is going on when parked and the engine isn’t on.

The only way to test the battery stock is to pull out a multimeter and pop the hood which works well, but you have to have a multimeter and it’s only valid at that point in time.

If you have a scangauge you can set one of the gauge displays to display the voltage. You do however have to open the truck and press a button to wake it up if the rig isn’t on, it will tell you the voltage on the fly and does work.

The third way is to install a dedicated battery monitor, there are a number of them out there, some are better than others some have multi-information displays, some are simple, some are expensive some are very cheap. You can see where I’m going here you have a ton of choices.

For my installation I found the Gammatronix Multimode Programmable Battery Monitor (Model C) a good fit for my needs. I wanted a flexible LED based battery monitor that is always on that I could look into the rig from the outside to determine the battery status at a glance. This is a 6 LED system that is microprocessor controlled that can be programed with different setpoints based on the battery useage. I also like the fact that you can program the display to either be a bargraph(all LEDs on depending on voltage), single LED illuminated based on the setpoint, or flashing. The installation on the device is a simple 2 wire setup, the only odd thing is the ground wire is blue rather than black, I don’t know if the is a UK thing, since that is where this unit comes from.

I’ve included the chart from Gammatroix webstore to show the voltage mapping, I’m currently running Volt Map setting 3, when I install my second battery I will have the primary battery setup with setting 3 and the secondary battery setup with setting 4. I might install a switch at some point to turn off the display if I know I’m going to be parked for a long time or if I don’t want it to draw attention when I’m parked when I’m out and about.

Overall a battery monitor is cheap insurance to protect your battery from extended discharge that can result in damage to the battery that can end up costing you time and money to deal with.

Gammatronix Web store the current price as of this writing is 20.30 with 3.30 shipping from the UK

Bargraph View.
Single LED view