Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I just got around to charging up my vagabond lithium and the charger is making a buzzing noise when charging the battery. Is that normal or possibly a defective unit?

I got my Vagabond Mini last week and plugged it in and charged it as soon as I took it out of the box............no noise at all. F.Y.I.

It is not something to be terribly concerned about at the moment. That is a transformers and bound to make some noise. We are running some test to note the characteristics of the noise. So far, all chargers tested make noise, but varies from AC source and battery depletion.

Good evening. I don't mean to hijack this thread, but has anyone else experienced problems with the VML chargers? I purchased one from the first wave or so of them for my wife, and she loves it. As portable power goes, it's hard to beat the size and capabilities of it.

A few days ago, she started noticing it was not firing consistently, but dismissed it as a faulty sync cord. Later, she noticed the charge indicators didn't light at all where they used to indicate the available charge in the battery. I'm afraid my charger has gone bad, primarily because the light on the power supply remains dark and there is no output voltage of any sort on it despite a verified 120v AC input to the charger. Consequently, I think she has nearly completely discharged the battery, and the inverter has no output.

Plug the charger in and look at the LED on the charger itself. The LED should be red, indicating charging, and should turn green once the battery is charged.

If the light is green when you plug it in, try removing the charger wall plug, with the battery still connected. If the battery is charged, the charger light will remain green. If the battery is not charged, the light should go out.

It's possible, if this was an early VML, the charger connector that plug into the VML is not making contact. So try one more thing: Plug the charger into the wall and into the VML and turn the VML on for a couple of minutes and see if the "3/4+" LED turns green. If the 3/4 LED isn't green (actually all three VML LEDs) yet the charger LED is green, this indicates a loose charger to VML connection. Try wiggling this connection and see if the charger LED will turn RED, indicating the charger is now working. Let me know here what the tests reveal and I'll guide you through the issue here.

Further to what Luap said, some of the early units came with problematic Anderson connectors. One of mine had symptoms similar to what you described, and it was "fixed" by tweaking the copper connectors with a jewelers screwdriver.