I've been mucking about with these chargers lately, and talking to people that know them even better.GRMarks wrote: Hey weber early in your post you played with elcon chargers (now TC chargers), you opened one up and had a peek inside. Mine has just died 1/2 way through charging. Is there a fuse inside (wishful thinking thats its something simple)? I am not an electrical engineer so I may have to take it to someone to get it fixed. But if there are some simple potential problem points I could check out those things first before taking it to someone.
Yes, there are fuses inside. As Weber mentioned in another thread, there is a mains fuse; after opening it (there are 1.5 zillion screws) just follow the mains lead. Near where it terminates on the PC board, there is a fuse. It may indeed be soldered in. I've not heard of these blowing frequently.

There is also a fuse at the DC end; it may be in heatshrink tubing. I've not heard of these DC fuses blowing often, either, and the heatshrink suggests that they don't expect to replace them often. From the silk screening on the printed circuit board, it may be flat down like the AC fuse, or vertical as shown below.


The larger chargers are in fact two chargers in one box, hence the two sets of read and black leads near the fuse above. Both sides have independent fuses.
I'm told that a moderately frequent failure mode is for the charger to overheat (it does reduce power on higher temperatures, but it may not do enough or fast enough if cooling is restricted), and this opens a relay on the AC side. There are a pair of 150R resistors across this relay contacts; they are part of a sort of bootstrap circuit whereby a little current gets through the resistors on first switch-on, which is enough to run a Viper module which generates two sets of 12 V, and one of these sets runs the relay. When the charger overheats, it turns off this relay somehow, and the 150 R resistors (marked R1 and R23 according to the DIYelectriccar schematic overheat and fail. I have modified the schematics as I found corrections and additions, and posted them on the next 2 pages. These are more up to date than the ones on the first page.
See also the Elcon Charger troubleshooting and repair thread, which I also contribute to. I post more about Elcon chargers there than here because two contributors from Alabama started the whole thing off.
Could your charger have been getting very hot, GRMarks? At least, these would be a relatively easy fix.