What’s the Difference Between Spring Starter and Electrical Starting System?

Many people have the same question, what is the relationship between the spring starter and the electrical starting system, and what is the connection between them? What scenarios are they applied for? We compared their characteristics and development trends and compiled the following information for you.

What’s the Use of Electrical Starting System?

The electrical starting system was first invented in 1915 in purpose to reduce injury cases of operators who started vehicle engines with hand cranks. The power and convenience provided by electric starters established the dominance of automobiles containing internal combustion, as seen to this day. Electric starters also allowed more powerful engines to be safely implemented, contributing to the rise of automobiles, and it’s also widely applied in other industrial machinery and equipment. Even though the electric starter is ubiquitous, back-up spring-powered engine starters have been developed to overcome a dead battery or other electrical issues.

What’s the Use of Spring Starter?

Spring starter is not a regular device for daily use. Instead, it’s a device that will provide mechanical starting when the battery of electric starter lacks power, which makes emergency/auxiliary generator sets more reliable to meet the requirements of firefighting, emergency rescue, military, marine, or some other harsh environments. The units of energy input, storage, transfer, and release are integrated into one spring starter assy. Requiring no external systems, the spring starter is a little larger than an electric starter. It only needs manpower to wind the input adaptor by winding handle, and the springs inside will be compressed to store energy. By pulling the trip lever, energy will be released to turn the engine flywheel. Then the engine gets started. Precisely because of these characteristics，where applications require rapid extraction of energy, springs starters (and other mechanical starter systems) have an advantage.

What’s the Advantage of Spring Starter?

High Reliability

A spring engine starter would have several unique traits when compared to electrical starting systems. Of the advantages presented by these systems, the potential for these systems to be operated by hand is perhaps the most appealing. This could appeal to owners of riding lawnmowers, motorcycles, snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles, snowblowers and other medium-sized engines that consumers may own, many of which have lead acid batteries. A spring starter may be especially attractive to this market because often these vehicles are used seasonally. Lead-acid batteries need to be replaced if left unused for long periods of time, which is feature steel springs do not share.

Easy Maintenance

Steel springs of spring starter also have a well-defined fatigue life, that can be theoretically infinite with the appropriate design considerations. The spring starter is very little affected by the electromagnetic environment and temperature, and it is not easy to age. As contrast, lead-acid batteries of the electrical starting system may last many years, but they are certainly not immortal.

Other Advantages

Compared to typical electric starting systems, and springs possess a high-power density, which means springs can release their stored power almost instantaneously. Besides, spring starter uses less harmful metals and is more environmentally for not loading batteries.

What’s the Disadvantage of Spring Starter?

Launch Time

Launching the engine with a spring starter is a mechanical process that requires manual operation, so it will take more time than using an electrical starting system. However, on occasions when the electrical starting system is limited or even not equipped at all, spring starting is one of the few solutions left.

Occupied Space

Usually, spring starter is a little larger than an electric starter and therefore takes more space to install. But from another perspective, ideally, a mechanical starter design would have the potential to reduce the size and weight of the components of the starting system. This is also one of the future R&D trends.

About Cqstart

Cqstart is an original design manufacturer of spring starter, launched the major product in 2008. With a senior engineer team, Cqstart keeps researching and developing spring starters to solve the problem of engine applications. In 2013, Cqstart innovated a protector, which significantly reduces the failure rate of spring starter, improving security. Later in 2018, through innovating distributed energy storage technology, parallel starter operation technology, Cqstart launched a new product – 0 group series, which is suitable for large engines. Now, it’s the most powerful spring starter, which is applicable engine capacity up to 50L.

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