CTEK Gulf Time To Go Battery Charger

Great charger

Delivered sooner than expected, does the job perfectly, great price. Thank You.

Great little charger, comes with eyelets to put a permanent and quick connection when required, easy enough to use however instructions could be a little clearer about using the different modes it has. Not the cheapest of charger's out there but robust piece of kit and time will test its durability.

UPDATE: This charger is not able to estimate how long it takes to charge an AGM stop/start battery. Even after the initial 30 seconds or so "thinking time" the charger takes before determining the "Time To Go", it seems to default to 8 hours, and get to the "GO" status in under 8 hours. In the last instance, it was under one hour, having indicated 8 hours at the start of charging. It seems to estimate the traditional battery more accurately. Given the additional functionality with lower voltage batteries that the MXS5.0 has, as well as a display that tells you what the charger is up to, rather than an inaccurate guess as to how long to charge remains, I'd go for the MSX5.0 if you can get it for the same price or cheaper than this "Time To Go" charger, but you'll miss out on the Gulf livery.CTEK make a range of car battery chargers, and my choice of this one was guided partially by price, but mainly by the feature set. I wanted one that would do everything I needed it to do, but also offer minimum opportunity for me to mess things up. I have an AGM battery in my car, so it had to be able to charge AGM batteries too. (AGM batteries are used in "stop-start" cars, as they can handle the repeated heavy load on the battery as a result of stopping and starting the car repeatedly. They're expensive, complicated, and don't like being left to run flat.)As I don't use my car much, and I have a hard-wired dash camera with parking mode, there's always a drain on my car battery. I've noticed that the stop-start doesn't work all the time, and also now and then the car tells me I need to drive the car to charge the battery. Both are indications that I'm not driving the car enough to keep the battery happy.Anyway, that's why I bought this charger. I can connect it to my car on the drive as the charger offers good water resistance, with an o-ring on the cable connection, and the charger is capable of working at a range of temperature extremes. (-20°C to +50°C). Also, this particular model has an indicator to tell you roughly how long the car will take to charge. (Very roughly, it turns out. More on this later.)I drove my car on a 20 minute drive (including a motorway section) a couple of days ago, so I was very surprised why I connected the charger to my car and it told me it would need 8 or more hours to charge the battery. "Really?! Oh! Okay." I thought. I popped out in my wife's car, and left mine charging on the drive. A couple of hours later, I got home and checked on my car battery status while it was on charge, and was surprised to see that it was fully charged and was now in the "Care" setting, presumably some sort of trickle charge. (see pics)It's probably worth noting that my dash camera (Viofo A129pro) is hardwired to my car and has parking mode enabled, so was probably running and recording while I was fettling under the bonnet when I connected the charger, so it may well be that this caused a voltage drop which misled the CTEK into thinking it had more work to do than it actually had. Whatever the reason, the time left to charge cannot be relied upon, in my experience.The leads on the charger are not particularly long. You get a 135cm mains lead, and a 105cm 12v lead, as well as the 30cm battery connection leads. Usefully, you get crocodile clamps and ring-style connectors as options for connecting the charger to your battery. The ring connectors offer permanent under-bonnet fitment. However on my battery, the end of the bolt securing the lead onto the battery terminal is flared, and the nut cannot be removed to fit the +ve ring connector. This was a bit of a disappointment, and it would be nice if there was an option of a spade connector to use in such instances. (Or at least some sort of solution to the issue.)CTEK recognises the problem of short leads and provide a 2m 12v extension lead, which I ordered with the charger. I bought the 2m extension lead, and I still need my mains extension lead to use this charger and when I use the mains extension lead I don't need the 12v extension lead at all. So unless you're sure you need the 2m lead, I wouldn't buy it. I used the crocodile clamps, which are well-made, open plenty wide enough and didn't spring off in use.Setting the charger up was easy enough, but the instructions are not great. They tell you very little in many, many different languages, so it's helpful if you know what you are doing. If you know what you want the charger to do, the charger is simplicity itself to use. There's only one button to press, and so long as you set it to the right program for your battery, you'll have no issues.I'm not impressed that the headline feature of this "Time to Go" charger, i.e. telling me how much time before full charge is remaining, just doesn't work for me. That said, I'm happy that the charger recognised that the battery was actually just a little low, charged it and then put itself into "Care" mode. That tells me that the "Time to Go" feature isn't just a dumb timer set by the initial battery voltage level, but the charger is paying attention to the battery condition during charging.The charger and accessories are well-made, and apparently CTEK have a good reputation, so the chances are this is a reasonable purchase for me and should serve me well. You can spend less or spend considerably more money buying a CTEK charger, but I think the "Time to Go" charger hits a sweet spot between useful features, simplicity to use and not being alarmingly expensive or suspiciously cheap. The charger is simple to use, and I do like the fact that you can just plug it in and leave it going without having to worry about it boiling your battery away. I can't think of anything I'd need it to do that it doesn't do. As far as I can tell, this "Gulf" branded charger is much the same as the standard "Time to Go" CTEK charger, only it's a bit cheaper, which is why I chose this version of the standard one. Recommended.

I’ve bought this charger Purposely to trickle charge my van during the times it’s stationary for 3 days or more. This is the original van battery and it works fine, unless the van sits idle for a few days, then it cranks over more slowly.This handy little charger can be hooked up in a few minutes and left to do its thing. Just Plug-n-Play so to speak. I do intend fitting the Pig tail that came with it to the battery, that will allow me to just plug my charger in as opposed to using the crocodile clips as you see in the photo. Will be much easier and quicker in the future.I’m definitely pleased with my Putchase.

Excellent charger and maintainer and IMO it’s the best on the market the only difference between this and the mxs5 is this model tells you how long until it’s charged rather than telling you the level of charge on the mxs5 I am currently using this on my bmw 340i to keep the battery topped upExcellent bit of kit

I have 4 regular CTEK MSX 5.0 and this Gulf Livery one, I have a few cars in long terms storage. This one is more or less the same as those as far as I can see. Works great.

Being sold at a discount because they made too many with Gulf branding, I guess. Grab one!