NOCO GENIUS1, 1A Automatic Smart Charger, 6V and 12V Portable Automotive Car Battery Charger, Battery Maintainer, Float Charger, Trickle Charger and Battery Desulfator with Temperature Compensation

Okay, i did not expect this little thing to work, but it did and might for you if you have patience.

My grandfather who was moat (mechanic of all things) owned back in the day what i thought were real chargers, they were so big and heavy they had to be put on wheels and rolled around, they had giant switches that’d illuminate and while i’m probably purely imagining this they were plugged into 220-volt outlets. This thing fits in the palm of my hand, just as pictured, smaller than most mobile phones. ‘huh,’ i said, ‘this should be comical.’

i hooked it up and, as others have said, figuring this thing out is not straight forward, the instruction manual is weak to say the least, the good news is, as i found, there are many intrepid experimenters who, like me, bought it on a whim and did some trial and error which it’d seem 99% of them got the thing to work to their needs, just like me hence, i’m taking the time to write this review. What this lacks in coherent features or instructions it makes up for it in the end by eventually (boy i mean eventually) getting the job done, for that honestly i’m giving it a generous five stars, because it did what i wanted it do against all odds, just like the phil collins song. (‘just take a look at my car now, ’cause it’s finally starting here.’)

to get the to point, this took two weeks to charge a completely dead battery in a completely dead system. If it’ll help anyone i own a 2000 lexus rx300 that is, in fact, drinking age, if i could find a small ute-friendly bar to have a couple with me of which, in terms of trusty old friends, this boring beige over beige has been one of my best now with over 270,000 miles with no reason, per the lexus dealer, to give up the ghost before 300,000. Toyota quality and then some with only wearables and maintenance needed btw, the car has only had one issue, eating car batteries every four or so years. Being a cheap bastard and lexus parts are pricy i’ve chosen battery over a slightly-off generator which brings us to the recent hullabaloo and the need to be the noco genius, though it’d prove not straightforward as i hoped.

Hooking up the noco genius you get a slowly blinking light, like a heartbeat, that will tell you nothing really. Also there’s a force-charge setting where you hold the button (there’s only one button on the whole thing, this thing is basic) it supposedly will force a charge into a battery… This doesn’t work, at all. After some digging it supposedly only does this if a battery is below some arbitrary limit which, my battery was completely dead, kaput, nada, force charge only made the 6v light go on which, apparently, is what others experienced. Point being, don’t hold you breathe.

I kept trying to charge the battery but it didn’t budge, didn’t budge, didn’t budge, then i had a thought and said to myself ‘self, what if i unhook the battery, then charge it?’ as in, is it because it’s also hooked to my car hence current is going other places? Mind you, this thing is only one (1) amp, that’s very little, if you’re looking for a quick charger or something to charge and jump your car, this ain’t it, have you seen the size of this thing? Ha no, no, but it will trickle, very slowly, a charge into your battery… If it’s not hooked to the car.

Listen, some people this may work when the battery is not hooked up and, in fact, i hooked my battery back up after this thing actually worked and then hooked up the noco to it and it did, in fact, go from red blinking to green, sooo, yeah, that happened. But i’m burying the lede here:

the noco charger worked for me but only after it was hooked to the battery without being connected to the car. Total time to charge the battery not hooked to the car? About 36 hours. Great? Eh, there’s a pandemic, i’m not really going out much so had time on my hands, not to mention my wife’s car.

In summation, if you have even a completely dead battery or run down battery and if you don’t have to go anywhere in the next two days and if you’re comfortable unhooking the leads from your car to your battery so that it’ll only be charging the battery itself this noco genius is, er, uh, genius! It really works! It works and for the cheap cheap cheap money its worth every penny. If this thing cost even 50% more i’d be taking down stars but this thing cost less than a steak dinner (back when i ate steak) so suffice to say it got my battery charged all the way up, hooked up to my car and after the computer was all ‘what the… ??? Was i in a coma’ my car fired right up and ran, i even drove it around a bit.

This would be a good thing to own for just-in-case as its just in case money. If you have any situation close to mine, get this trickle charger, if you need the big guns, well, open up your wallet and say ah. Luckily most of us, probably 99% of us, if your battery is run down, this will do the trick.

Best of luck!

Have a car that is a spare and never gets driven. A year ago i put a new costco interstate battery in it, but it was dead due to not using the vehicle. I was going to purchase a battery charger from an auto parts store or harbor freight or wherever but decided to check the amazon. Saw the noco genius 1 and figured what the heck, price is right and if it does not work, off to kohl’s to return. Hooked up as in the instructions but something in the fuse panel was clicking and the noco would shut off. Click on then off. Removed the positive cable from battery and hooked up. Lights all lit up and seemed to be working. 24 hours later the car started. This from a totally dead battery, no lights, no clicks from ignition, nothing. This is a tiny little unit, but the darn thing works. Takes longer then a big ol charger, but for $29 vs $179 its a deal worth taking. Also works as a maintainer slash trickle charger. Seems to good to be true, but worked for me.

I’ve bought half a dozen of the one and two amp versions to trickle charge my automobile and tractor batteries between use. They are well built and work great, and the reason i buy them is i can mount them under the hood and plug them in when i park, like a block heater.

However, the computer locks up after a few days. All you need to do is power cycle it, but that defeats the point of a trickle charger keeping infrequently used equipment ready. The manufacturer apparently failed to properly test the software before producing a gazillion and sealing the cases shut. After a few days, a counter overflows in the computer and locks it up. That’s a very common error for inexperienced programmers to make, i knew immediately.

Since they don’t offer a fix, i had a look. I’ve done software changes on lots of equipment over the years. Noco has these sealed well, no easy way in. I’m sure that’s why they aren’t fixing it under warranty. I’m sure the present great sales price is so they can clear out old stock and start selling the same thing with the software fixed.

Noco recommends these for short term use, because they have the software error, and recommends using one of their excellent large chargers to trickle charge. I can’t mount big units on every battery i own.

Instead, i grabbed a cab and talked to my elm tree, as even after she became a stump, she was still the best resource i had for problems at work. Surely she could handle a noco.

Well, she didn’t disappoint. As i started my third cab, i thought about this. Today, everything has a computer, everything comes from china, and everything is being done by newbie engineers. If i fix noco, guaranteed other stuff in the room will need a reset.

So, i got a 24 hour electronic timer ($3 at menards or $5 from amazon) and made a special ‘self reset’ circuit. I have it shut down every 24 hours for 5 minutes, in the middle of the night. Now my internet modems, ip phones, satellite receiver, rokus, and my trickle chargers are reset once a day. I figured these are newbie programmers, the boss won’t let them run tests longer than 24 hours, so i’ll reset every 24 hours.

It’s really working well, my only regret is i couldn’t get a similar timer for the grandkids.

Just plug it in and it works. It does what it is supposed to do very well. The charger stays cool during operation. An easy to see green light turns on when the battery is fully charged (from red when charging). I love that i can simply plug it in and forget it for long periods of time.

Note: i replaced the following defective charger: car battery charger trickle charger automotive, topdon tornado1200 6v 12v 1.2 amp fully automatic smart battery charger & maintainer desulfator. The topdon is much cheaper and it shows. It does not continue charging after a power blip, it quit after just a few months. Topdon would not simply send out a new charger but requires the old one returned which would cost more than half the price of a new one. So i just went with the noco genius1 and am very happy with the decision. I will never purchase a topdon battery charger again.

I have a 1997 ford 150. I am nursing it along — but it’s getting tired. Last spring, i put a $200 die hard in it. That battery has been working great, but then i had an over heating problem so the truck sat for several weeks. Of course, the battery drained down to nada. I didn’t want to spend another fortune, but i did want to protect my investment. I knew very little about trickle charging, but i have another noco jump start device that works great, so i took a chance on this. It took me a while to figure out which setting to use… (advise to to check to see whether your battery is standard or agm). And because it’s just 1 amp, the trickle is really a trickle. So it took a while to charge — longer than the instructions predicted. And in fact, i never got a steady green light. However, after a day and a half, i put the battery back in and (happy day) my truck turned over no problem. I have since had it in the shop for a new thermostat. Back on the road with no battery problems.

I recommend having this in your arsenal. I dont drive that much so of course my batter is low. My mechanic recommended this brand so i ordered on same day. I did remove battery from car to charge in the house. It took 9 hours to charge my auto battery (since so low). I loved this item so much i went back and ordered the $99 one for faster charging since winter is coming up. I do have a jd heavy duty one but as it also is very heavy to haul to car to jump and charge. This little thing i can easily hook up and close my hood and let it do its thing. Love how compact it is. Important: be sure you read key instructions as to what battery type you have as well as correct order to place clamps on. One last thing……add it to your cart as you wont regret it.

I bought this specifically to keep a 12v marine battery charged. I have only a 50 lb thrust trolling motor for my small bass boat and need to charge it after each trip on the lake. I also use the motor to blow the lake bottom ‘dust’ away from our dock so it has gotten a lot of use in 2 months. I even accidently shorted the two terminals on the battery for a brief nano-second with no apparent damage to the battery after the next charge. It is not a fast charger; takes about 30 hours to charge a mostly depleted battery (65wh) but i think that will add to the longevity of the battery.

The great things about this charger is it is compact, versatile, and high quality.
The fact that you can charge a battery that is 100% discharged is the reason i bought it and it works flawlessly. My other brand charger (much more expensive) would not detect that that is was even a 12v lithium battery because it was all the way dead it wanted to try to charge at 6v but then just failed as a defective connection. So it can bring back a zombie battery to life!!! Highly recommend it for a lithium 12v battery!!

A couple years back i was suddenly having electrical issues with my 1999 mitsubishi eclipse and couldn’t figure out why. The fact my car was totally overhauled with new parts inside and out made the situation even more irksome. Combine that with not knowing what the source could’ve been was the cherry on this turd sundae. Bad wiring? Blown fuse(s)? Grounding issue? Nope. Just the typical $150 car battery not even a year old that was barely holding up because it just gave up on life, just like i do when i’m on the clock.

One red top optima purchase later changed that entirely. No more gambles on whether or not my car would turn over. The interior lights stopped spazzing out. My audio system stopped whining in tune with the accelerator. Great, i love it ~ so how do i keep this thing charged since it’s my summer-only car? Optima sells their own ‘ideal’ smart charger of course… For a much higher price. Screw that. People claimed alternatives are better as long as it supported agm batteries and this does just that. Throughout the winter months (which here in indiana is 9 months a year) i’d plug the smart charger in and top off the red top. The noco is practically idiot proof and i have to give some small praise for it having memory so there’s no need to manually cycle through charge options every time it’s plugged in.

While being a powerhouse, an optima brand battery also has to be pampered a little bit as it’s different from your traditional flooded lead acid type and because if this property it requires a different method of charging. A $5 float charger from harbor freight will not be able to do the job. In fact it may damage the whole unit and you’re out $300+. It’s sensitive to overcharging so that’s why any device delivering added juice to the battery needs to know when to call it quits. Thanks, noco ~ you made an awesome product for another awesome product.

Had battery tenders before. These are chargers / tenders / maintainers all in one. I have 7 of these now: john deere, bobcat, 12kv generator, honda cb1100, gmc duallie, shop test battery & a spare in case something else comes along. Never had a problem with any of them & some are 4 years old. Won’t buy anything else now.

I have two of these. They are not exactly the same model (i think one of them is an older version of this model). The older one, i have had in the garage for several years to keep the batteries in the cars up when they are not driven very often. Some people say these are not for car batteries and i won’t argue with them but the one i have out there definitely keeps the battery in my 2001 corolla charged. And in fact, we had an incident where someone left a dome light on in that car and drained the battery to the point to where there was absolutely no response from anything electrical in the car. We started the car with a jumper pack, pulled it in the garage and connected it to the noco and let it do it’s thing. That’s been at least a year and that battery is still going strong in that car.

I purchased this one off amazon to use on various sla batteries i have around. I have two jumper packs with 18 ah sla batteries in them. One of them had been sitting in the garage for several years due to the fact last time i tried to charge it, it wouldn’t charge. I was going to order a new battery for it from amazon but i figured i kind of needed an extra charger for sla batteries anyway and this noco unit was less than the price of a new battery for the old jumper pack.

I figured it would be a long shot to try and charge that old battery and get any more life out of it but i thought it would be interesting to see what would happen. Can’t be a tougher challenge for a sla battery that’s been sitting in a garage dead for years.

Well, that jumper pack doesn’t exactly have easy access to the battery but after some fighting with it, i got it open and popped the clamps on the terminals. The charging light began to pulse and after about a day, went green (was still pulsing but was pulsing green). It finally went solid green. I left it plugged in a few days. I have one of those miniature inverters that plugs into a cigarette lighter (that particular jumper pack doesn’t have a built-in inverter but does have a cigarette lighter plug). So i plugged it in and tested it with a clamp light.

So far, seems to be working about as well as you’d expect for a jumper pack battery that is probably approaching ten years old now. Or maybe better than you’d expect. It’s only a 12 watt led in the clamp light but my main goal was to get every last bit of value from any sla batteries that i can. I’d definitely have a use for a small inverter like that in a power outage and if you have an extra battery that you can plug it into, so much the better. I believe the built-in charger on that jumper pack just may have died or was not up to charging it’s battery for whatever reason.

Remains to be seen how much more life i can get out of such batteries but it’s definitely worth the price paid.

Arrived in about 10hrs prime. Well packaged, instruction manual could be expanded but i’m a techy so not hard to fill in the blanks. Jeep battery:. 3yo diehard red agm 34. I don’t drive for long distances and never ever fully charged battery from vehicle. It’s a pretty compact charger so prior to use i did some research. Since the genius one is not rated to charge a battery larger than 30ah with much effort i deduced my cheaper battery was around 30-35ah so i decided to give it a go so i removed battery, put in safe location , set the charger on agm mode and started the process. Based upon the minimal chart in the manual i came to about 30hrs to revive the battery. So i waited. No warning indicators and off to the races. Pretty much right at 30hrs the green light came on and the battery went from 12/12.2 volts to holding a 13.1v charge. Success! A few days later battery still holding a 12.6 to 13.1v charge. I highly recommend this, however if i could have swung it i would have gone for a 2+amp model to cut the charge time in half or less. $30 for a new, and renewable, $150 battery is a huge deal! I can’t rate longevity since i’ve used it once, however, it is build well for $30.

I’m using this device to trickle charge a subaru forester battery, we don’t use the car very often. It took almost 2 days using this device for it to move from red light pulsing green. The instructions say 6 hours. Don’t be fooled if your battery is very low it will take days. Initially i had problems even getting the unit out of standby mode but then it ‘just started working’. The cord is too short. If i had known it was only about 7 feet i would have bought a competitor that had a longer cord. Had to buy an extension cord (bought a normal one). If you buy the cord they sell that extends the original cord, it’s incredibly overpriced. I’m tempted to give this unit only 3 stars, but will give it four because of the versatility of charging other battery types and the ‘force’ mode it has.

I originally got this charger to charge up some small 6v sla batteries and it worked well for that usage. But with the pandemic and change in habits, i found that i used my vehicle significantly less than i used to and the battery would drain from too infrequent usage. But i had this small charger on hand, so decided to use this on my car.

So unlike other comments i have seen here, this charger did charge my 550cca 12v sla car battery from basically dead to full. Yes, this charges at a max of 1amp, so it took a few days, but i wasn’t going anywhere so was good enough. Plus, charging slow is better for the battery health anyway.

Now i use this charger to keep the battery topped off between trips, since it’s typically a week or more. It has been excellent so far at this and the form factor means it just is plugged in on a wall outlet in the garage and out of the way, so very nice. I just hang the wires off the plug itself when not in use.

But, why a 4 star review? Well, the only complaint i have about this charger is the indicator. The manual stays it will slow blink red when charge level is below 75% and then green when above. Well, i’m not sure what is going on, but the charge level it seems to switch from red to green does not seem to be consistent for me. The car battery (this is a pretty bog-standard 12v sla car battery) basically has to be completely charged before it changes from red to green for whatever reason. Other than that nit-pick it is great!

I bought 4 in dec 2021, one of them just died, let’s see how customer support is. Otherwise they work as expected, keeping a trickle charge on all my various small engines and motorcycles. The connection is proprietary, so it isn’t compatible with battery tender ,of which i have many already hard wired in , so i use the alligator clips with these instead. A minor pain ,but not insurmountable

Great product but for one thing. I attached the eyelets onto the battery for trickle charging my low usage car. The disappointing thing was that the cable is too short to have the connector to the charger cable reach up to the windshield wiper well. I had to splice about 18 inches of wire between the eyelets and the end connector so that i can plug the charger cable to the battery cable without having to pop the hood. The charger is plugged into the garage door opener so it’s quite easy to simply pull the charger cable down and plug it in. Having the cable dangling in front of the driver’s side windshield assures that you notice it needs to be unplugged before driving off.

I purchased two noco genius battery chargers in 2022; 1a and 5a models for use overseas. 220v input voltage was primary in my consideration of the noco genius chargers. Both work perfectly on 220v. I use the 1a genius to charge my motorcycle battery after storage, and the 5a to charge batteries in my automobile and tractor. I prefer the 4 led charge indicator on the 5a charger to the single led on the 1a charger. Had i known this when i purchased the chargers, i would have spent a little more and purchased the noco genius 2, which also has a 4 led charge indicator. Outside of that very minor issue, no complaints whatsoever. Very happy with the performance of the noco chargers.

En algunas oportunidades la batería ya está cargada y el indicador no lo muestra

Good charger works good. Perfect for my motorcycle but should include battery connector

I purchased this to try to recover a discharged car battery. The directions say that this product is for smaller batteries, but i took a chance. I learned a few things. First, disconnect the battery from the car before charging. Before i disconnected the car, the battery never went into charging mode but stayed in recovery mode. After i disconnected the car, the recovery mode took about a day and the full charge took about 3 more days. But it does work. Next time i will buy a bigger model for a car battery.