Has anyone here replaced there old Schott charger to a Quickcharge and if so how hard was it to do ?
Thanks Carl
I have recently swapped out my Schott charger to the Quickcharge SCO7210 charger. Pretty straight forward (after a lot of research on what to do with the wiring). I’d be glad to share what I did, if you need assistance.
I’d like to know how you wired it, if you don’t mind. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen a Schott, and I recall they had more wiring connections than the QuckCharge does. This question seems to come up a lot of late.
Thanks.
Please any help with this would be great as I am on my first Gem Car !! I’m good with mechanical stuff so I’m not afraid to try . But your guidance would be greatly appreciated. ! Thanks Carl
A little background: The Schott charger was in my '99 Gem. I replaced the Schott unit with the Quickcharge SCO7210 charger w/drive lock-out, temperature compensation, & remote LED (this is not an online option; I had to call them and have it added. Great people BTW).
jrjava, you are absolutely right there are more wiring connections on the Schott charger.
Mounting: By looking at Quickcharger unit, I would have guessed it was much smaller than the Schott charger. However, there wasn’t a huge difference. The Quickcharger is a little smaller (dimensionally), but definitely heavier. I removed the Schott Charger and mounted the Quickcharger in the same location. I used self tapping screws and lagged it through the aluminum plate into the square tubing behind it. As a note, there were two sets of ground wires on the right side of the Schott charger. One set of the ground wires were attached to each of the right-hand mounting screws. The top wire was long enough to attach to the top-right Quickcharger mounting screw, but the bottoms ground wires were not. I just lagged them to the aluminum plate with a new self tapping screw. (If I had to do it again, I would have attached the bottom wires before mounting the new charger)
Wiring: Like mentioned before, the Schott charger has several wires and my new Quickcharge charger only has 4 (plus the external LED). The fortunate part is I only had to worry about 2 wires from the Schott charger. There is a green wire and a red/green wire on the Schott charger 8-pin plug. These are the drive lockout wires. I attached these two wires to the two short black drive lockout wires on the Quickcharger. (If the Quickcharger wouldn’t have had the drive lockout feature, I would have connected the green & red/green wires together. The Gem will run fine this way, you just have to make sure you unplug it, before taking off). I did nothing else with any of the Schott charger wiring, other than zip tie it to the harness to clean it up. I attached the other two QC wires (long lead charging wires) to each side of the battery pack. The black (negative) wire went to the negative terminal (top right lug) on the controller and the red (positive) wire went to the post on the inlet side of the main contactor fuse. (these are the same landing points for the Schott Charger leads).
The last step to installing my Quickcharger was the remote LED. The QC’s LED is a 3-wire circuit board with a mounting screw (shorter wires). The original Gem light (in the dash) is a 2-wire LED with a through-hole mount. Instead of making any kind of conversion to mount the new QC LED in the existing spot, I elected to mount it on the face of the dash, in the center. I may go back and and change this later, but I was lazy and did not want to lengthen the wires and change the mount.
All in all, this was a fairly straight-forward retrofit. I had some difficulty on the research side of trying to figure out exactly what to do with the wiring. I couldn’t find any “put peg A into hole B” instructions. However, by looking through a ton of information posted by the good people on this forum, I was able to accumulate enough notes to sort it out.
I should also mention that all functionality remains as it was with the OEM charger, with the benefit of the Quickcharge advantages. Win-Win.
I will also apologize, as my wife told me I should take pictures of the entire job, so I could help the next guy out. I didn’t, and I can already hear “I told you so”. If you would need pics, let me know and I’ll get you some.
I hope this helps.
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Thanks. Much appreciated.
Great news! Glad to help.
Hello,
I am in the process of changing out my Schott charger on a 2000 GEM e825. My 8-pin plug had three wires, red/green, black/green and black/yellow. I’m hooking up a quick charge with lockout. Does anybody know which two wires might be the lockout? Thx
Red/green & black/green in your case IIRC.