Look after your caravan’s leisure battery whenever you’re not touring, because when you’re ready to hitch up and go on holiday again, the last thing you want is a delay from a flat battery. You may think it’s all fine, because it was nicely topped up by the electric hook-up on your last holiday. Do check though. It’s surprising how many little gadgets can conspire to steadily drain down your battery. The caravan’s alarm system and electronic devices may not need much power, but it all adds up.

Now is a good time to adopt a maintenance mindset and buy yourself a smart modern battery charger and conditioner so that you’ll never suffer the frustration of a flat battery again. 

We tested eight battery chargers against each other to find out which is the best buy to keep your caravan leisure battery fully charged and well conditioned between holidays. They ranged in price from around £40 mark to £200 and the test revealed a few surprises.

On caravan holidays, what we really want from a smart battery charger and conditioner is that it should be smart enough to work out what kind of battery it’s charging up and deliver the optimum charge for that unit. We also want long leads, so that we can charge the leisure battery while it’s in the caravan, which may not be very near an electrical socket. We want good output, too, although we have to acknowledge that our leisure battery will only need a big charge when it’s pretty flat, and will then draw less and less current as the charging time goes on.  

Plus we’d like a reconditioning/desuiphation mode on our battery charger. If you know that your battery’s charge has fallen to a very low level for 
a long period, you can rescue it with a timely charge in reconditioning mode, because this should dissolve damaging sulphation from the battery’s plates before the deposits have a chance to become permanent and reduce the battery’s effectiveness. 

Not only that, did we mention that we need our battery charger to be at least a little bit weatherproof? The caravan is most likely to be stored on a drive or on grass, and definitely outdoors, so it must cope with the potentially damp conditions of the caravan’s battery compartment. Yes, we’re a fussy lot.

So how did the Clarke CC120 battery charger cope on all these counts – especially when pitted against seven rival smart chargers and conditioners during our test?  

In its favour, this cheap battery charging unit’s meaty maximum output of 8.5 Amps 
makes it ideal for batteries with capacities of 40-160Ah, 
which actually accounts for most of the cells we are likely 
to come across when charging up caravan leisure batteries.

Nevertheless, like Draper’s 11953, this is 
a basic conventional charger, which means that its operation is completely manual.

In other words, if you don’t keep a close eye on the unit’s ammeter and switch it off at the appropriate time, you could easily 
gas and ruin a modern battery. Obviously, this rules out any form 
of long-term conditioning.

Another niggle is the lead lengths: both the mains and 12V leads are so short, they’re almost unusable for charging up your caravan leisure battery in situ. 

So where did we place the Clarke CC120 when we had to decide on the best battery chargers and conditioners? It’s not at the top of the league, because that spot belongs to the Practical Caravan test winner, the five-star CTEK MXS 7.0, at £100. 

Next we have very good battery chargers that deserve their four stars apiece, the CTEK MXS 5.0, £60, the Ring SmartCharge+ 12 and Ring SmartChargePro 25, £190.

In the middle-rankings we have the three-star rated Draper 11953 battery charger, £60, and the three-star Sealey Autocharge 10D, priced at £37.

The penultimate product in our group test is the Draper 07265 battery charger, which has a smart little computer, plenty of versatility in charging up 6 Volt, 12 Volt and 24 Volt batteries, but low power output and short leads. We awarded the Draper two stars.

And finally… yes, the Clarke CC120 battery charger, at £47, is so basic that it gets just one star.