got my Romondes RD510 last nt. @ 7pm so tune in tomorrow Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel. guess I'll play with it today & see what happens. had to look at the video 1 more time before.

 

Got mine last night also!!

 

This product looks very intriguing and possibly a must have... I may have to pick one up

@Stu-mon and @TVPostSound I can't wait to read your reviews and to see some pictures!

-Rich

 

Just hooked it up, ran a quick test, now charging. Cars been sitting 2 weeks.

So I assume our AGMs are flat plate, not spiral??

 

The BMW-branded ones are indeed flat plate, not spiral. Other than Optima batteries, where the whole spiral cell thing is pretty obvious from the case shaping (aside from it being all over the marketing), flat plate AGM is probably what you’re going to find in a MINI even if a non-BMW brand (though manufacturer specs for those should tell if you can find them).

 

Right, I forgot about Optima, thanks for the reminder.

Mine is a "850 CCA H7 Duralast" (Johnson Controls) I bought recently.

 

Mine is an ACDelco Gold 94RAGM: AGM battery, BCI Group 94R, 850 CCA. The H7 and 94R BCI Group sizes are equivalent.

 

I believe those are also Johnson.

 

I didn’t know that — thank you!

 

Hey all, don’t forget to make note of these three measurements (only the 1st of which is available from BimmerLink, I note):

- SoC
- SoH
- Resistance

The last 2 are the ones that are hard tells — especially SoH — about battery health.

 

my bimmerlink check was 83% last week or so on my 15 mo. old batt., my new charger on test started on 56% went to 90% in 2 minutes, then took an hour to get to 100%. yeh, hour & 10 min. on charge total. went from new 800 CCA to 700 CCA, SOH was 87%, Int. Batt. Resistance 3.57, V went from 12.34 to 13.00 I only tested & charged, didn't check charging status or the other, maybe next time I'll do it. I like it alot. I see every 4 - 6 mo. maybe. EVERYBODY should have one of these on ANY car. the best I've ever had. Having an AEM watrer/methanol inj. pump (where the tool slot is in the back/back) made me wonder about all the battery draws but it only operates when car is running. ALL the battery draws when car ain't runnin' is what gets ya !

 

Yeah the battery draws when the car isn't running are definitely un-fun. SoH on my new battery was down to 83% when I checked it this morning. Do Not Like. I'm sure it will come back up but getting a bead on what "normal" is is definitely an exercise. FWIW I may have a short in the car -- AUC sensor -- if the codes I'm seeing about it are accurate, it may be doing some battery drain.

For reference in re resistance, my old battery, whose SoH tops out at 33% no matter how many times I run the repair option on the Romondes, will go no lower than 9.37 meghoms. Compare that to the new battery, which was at SoH 100% and resistance 2.67 meghoms pre-install (Nov 20).

Net takeaway for me is that BimmerLink is cool for what it is (and it is indeed a great tool) but for meaningful battery health monitoring you need a heftier tool (like the Romondes).

 

I get that too, especially now that weather is colder. And my battery is less than 6 months old.

Check for parasitic draw.
Open the hood, lock your car. Wait 20 minutes for everything to shut down.
Come back to your car, but keys in the refrigerator, disconnect the negative cable.
Get you VOM, set it to amps, bridge the VOM serially from the negative post to the negative cable end.

 

I think these tools are no good for the few of us that are OCD!!

 

Yeah, I've got a parasitic draw hunt in my future. I am pretty sure I have at least one bad electrical component, and possibly 2, to replace first though.

One component is the AUC sensor, which is either shorted to battery or has an open circuit condition (2 weird things to pair into the same error code, but that's what BMW did so well yino).

Second component, longer version later and probably in another thread, but looks like my alternator isn't regulating charging voltage properly and will require replacement (or repair, for those of us old-school enough to service at least specific parts of an alternator, if one can identify and get their hands on those parts). Net result of said alternator issue: poor charging, slow rundown of the battery over time. Fun-o.

 

My favorite time as tech in the past was rebuilding alternators, starters, power steering pumps, and steering gears.
Alternator brushes, diode, and regulator was a $20 kit. 2 hours labor to remove and rebuild!! Unless the armature blew, then toast!!

Now in the MINI, the alternator could be perfectly fine, it could be the IBS, or DME.

 

I've replaced some alternator brushes in my time -- but not on this particular alterduhickey. Probably requires bells or something lol

I'll put more detail up later, but basically the shop and I -- including the shop owner (independent BMW/MINI) personally -- burned a bunch of time today diagnosing the heck out of the car. We computer-diagnosed the poor F56 into inconclusiveville, and ended up pretty convinced there is some kind of fundamental power issue at work. Whatever it is appears to leave the car without sufficient power -- specifically meaning:

• undercharging / accelerated battery drain
• intermittent malfunction of the automatic start/stop (kicks engine back on immediately after stopping it)
  • Sometimes, not all the time
  • Often to the point of being predictable if there is a lot of electrical load (we identified having at least 1 heated seat on as a decent trigger)
  • In this scenario, upon engine restart, momentary loss of power-requiring comms to/from modules:
    • like the EPS module, resulting in "I can't talk to the EPS so I'm turning power steering assist off, I may or may not throw a message to the driver onscreen, but you'll find fun in stored codes kthxbye!"
    • whole bunches of codes (> 9):
      • show up across different comms and multiple modules
      • arrive together
      • resolve together
      • All of this again points to momentary, systemwide power loss/degradation, enough to be disruptive at engine start (sometimes with fallout like EPS deactivation) but not enough to render the car fully unusable, and not consistent enough to have driver-observable problems at each and every use of the car.

Combine the above with the battery failure history I've had and it screams a classic: alternator fail causes battery fail which masks alternator fail which, if not corrected, will take out some more things (maybe even the replaced battery) before a Big Alternator Is Bad sign shows up.

• All the "weird" is because this happens to be alternator/power fail under a computer system (the various car modules) that is far less tolerant of the resultant power fluctuations than, say, my 1995 not-BMW/MINI.

Yes it could be IBS, DME, etc., but BMW diags aren't turning up much there that looks conclusively like trouble (vs. side-effect of trouble), and the alternator is, additionally, far more "chaseable."

Now I just have to figure out what brushes are in that alternator

 

Root issue in my F56S turned out to be parasitic draw from a Genuine BMW/MINI accessory added to the car in 2021, installed following BMW/MINI's provided instructions. Details in this thread/post.

 

wow, just wow. that was truly heavy (CJVZ's DETAILS) all over a Mini - click & drive system ? (over my head) How often do you guys recommend run your Romondes ? I have iphone I plug into USB (only when I'm drivin' & chargin'.

 

Yeah, in my case, I effectively had a BMW-designed short circuit courtesy of the by-the-book accessory install. That kind of thing shouldn't appear out of nowhere on your car, short of Santa Claus modifying your vehicle in the dead of night

I would check on the battery with the Romondes at least every 6 months. For the last 3-ish weeks I've been using BimmerLink to monitor various voltage and current stats in real time, and what they're telling me is that so long as nothing is wrong (including the battery being marginal, for example) the car is pretty much going to charge just fine.

I would probably also run a charging cycle with the Romondes every 3-6 months, just to keep the SoH up. If you use the auto start/stop feature of the car I would definitely do a check and a charging cycle every 3 months.

One other thing about charging with the Romondes. You may already know this, but the proper way to charge a car battery -- any car, not just the MINI - is to connect the red/positive charger lead to the positive battery post, and the black/negative lead to a not-battery vehicle ground (like the engine block or alternator case). In-car, one specifically should NOT connect both charger leads directly to the battery to charge. For testing, yes, both leads on battery, in fact that's necessary for a valid test. For charging, absolutely not. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, up to and including literal kaboom. How likely is kaboom? Not likely. People ignore it all the time when jumping a car, for example -- but that doesn't mean there can't be consequences in a jump or charge-in-garage scenario.

To illustrate the point, one night while I was doing all this troubleshooting and I was kind of tired, I started up a charging cycle and I had both leads connected directly to the battery (via the posts under the hood you would use for testing). When I came out in the morning, nothing looked out of place. I get in the car, and the car has lost its date/time settings. Generally speaking that means the car lost power, which makes no sense with a recently-installed battery, much less one that was sitting on a charger overnight. So I reset the date/time, and find other settings have vanished, which I also take care of.

Then I scan for codes to figure out what happened. Short version, this brainy MINI cut the power circuits to various modules because it detected overcurrent and basically went "what the heck you doing, dude?" I am probably lucky it had the smarts to do so. And to be clear, this has never happened with the charger connected properly (I connect the negative clamp to a convenient spot on the engine block for charging). This happened only because that one time, I had both leads connected to the battery directly while charging.

Hope this is useful

 

roger that, will test with leads on batt. but move neg. lead to charge.never loiked that auto. start/stop, turned it off couple days after buyin' car. seemed like a drain to me. no bueno.

 

After returning the Romondes for arcing during pluging in and charging causing my AFCI house breakers to trip.
I ordered the Konnwei brand. $39.99 after the coupon on the page.

It seems Konnwei is the parent company. Romondes, is a 3rd party packager.

Lets see if this is any better!!

 

@TVPostSound definitely want to know whether the Konnwei is better re the arcing. That sparking is not cool!

 

good to know, hope yours was a rarity.

 

My Romondes does the same thing as @TVPostSound 's when I plug it in. Only difference is I don’t have an AFCI breaker on that circuit in my house, so the breaker doesn’t trip.

I also spotted a complaint in at least one review of the Romondes about the same behavior (spark at the plug when you plug it in).

This isn't the only product I've seen spark at plug-in. I have a pair of Anker Nano USB-C power bricks that do exactly the same thing.

I guess the point is for the Romondes this spark at the plug when you plug it in doesn’t appear to be a rarity, and if plugging it in on an AFCI-protected circuit it may cause the AFCI to trip.