Battery Diagnosis

Dunno if this is any use, but you can get smart NiMH / NiCd chargers now which feature diagnostic and quick capacity check modes, such as this one picked at random.

- Thanks, but that's not really very useful. These batteries are usually spot-welded together and made up into packs of all sorts of odd sizes and shapes. Breaking them out into individual cells is rarely an option.

Go to

- When I win the lottery, you betcha. That thing is like a solid platinum, diamond-encrusted screwdriver.

When in doubt, emulate normal use. Charge pack and discharge through lamp load and see the results.

So add 2 sewing needle probes to your tester/charger. They go thru plastic wraps into inter-cell gaps without a moments hesitation.

NT

"lakewood" wrote in news:1157564112.742958.213130 @i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Sounds like a winner. From the website:

Cadex Electronics has developed a technology to measure the state-of- health (SoH) of a battery in 3 minutes. QuickTest? services batteries for cell phones, two-way radios, laptops, scanners, medical equipment, video cameras and more. The program is built into the Cadex C7000 Series battery analyzers and services lithium-ion, nickel-metal-hydride, nickel- cadmium and lead-acid batteries.

If I was in the middle of nowhere and was tasked to determines which SLA out of a lot of 100 units of various sizes and shapes and shapes are bad, there is a quick test anybody can do. Pick up the unit (remember SLA only since they don,t spill) and turn it upside down a few times and listen for a fait noise like uncrushed pepper in a shaker. If not, gently shake the unit. If you here noise, it is likely bad. If the lot that is left have more than three that are same in the lot, you can do a field load test. Most likely you are stuck in the middle of nowhere with a car that went south. Put the 12v motor out of the washer unit and see if the 3 or more batteries run the motor at the same speed ( you will hear a pitch difference if not). If the same, they are all likely to be good than bad. (NiCad and Mh can be tested this way also but do a volt test for these if available because usually a cell goes bad and the voltage drops more than 1 volt) Do not try these methods with Lithium batt. technology. Risk of fire and/or explosions are high. Once again, these are test for emergencies in the middle of nowhere, the previous post cover everything else.

or you could put your tongue across the 12v terminals and see what colour it glows. In fact this would work, if you drop the batteries at your feet then any good ones you'll throw further away by reflex. Either that or your tongue will wrap itself round the terminals and hold on for dear life.

NT

I have done that up to a 9 volt square and still do, I found that this is the only one that you can tell. Maybe some of the 3 volts. In an emergency you can quick charge nicads by touching each cell to a car battery, your safety switch is your hand wrapped around it. When you let go, it is because it got to hot to hold and further charging will render it useless unless you wait to pick it up again. Your 500- 1000 thousand expected charges will be cut to 50 times. Don,t do it with anything less than a c size though. Be aware that there are fake D sizes that have a C size suspended inside and that will not trigger your "let go response" in time. You can ID them by how light and low miliamps rating. It can get crazy if the emergency is bad.

(caution ad follows)

I can't promise that this will work for your application but the ESR kit we sell (designed by Bob Roberts and kitted by Dick Smith in AU.) can be used to check the internal resistance of batteries up to 50VDC. If you are using our new (recommended) MOV protection you can still check the ESR of batteries up to around 18V (the MOV is 20V as I recall).

If you think the resistance of the batteries will give you a clue as to the condtion it is a pretty inexpensive piece of test equipment, plus you can check your electrolytics at the same time!

I would love to know if you buy the kit if it works for you in testing batteries!

John :-#)#

foolish. If my life were on the line, sure, but its a dangerous thing to do in peace time.

optimistic

NT

- Actually, I built one of these some years ago. It certainly doesn't have any MOVs in it. I'll give it a try.

I agree that all I wrote is dangerous, But I don,t mention lithium ion, they are dangerous to a point that their charge control is processor controlled with at least two fail-safes. (Makes me wonder about the recalls though). I grew up in a country where they had just modernized and goods were plenty but parts had not made to the market there and improvising was the only option, money was no good when a part was not available. The methods I stated have no value here and life threatening situations do not occur here either. Not only parts are plenty, the trend is to replace the whole thing lately.

I like to here an opinion of this, mainly the danger if present. I have a 6 amp sla low end model, I think they are for back lighting. It is 6 volts and run lights at 10 watts or sometimes 20 watts by turning on the second one. I had a sony handycam that had a 6 volt pack of nicad and the charger had a output for the camera and one with slightly higher volts and lower amp for the battery , I think around 7 to 9 volts. The use to charge the sla and have done so many 200 times and the camera charger goes through its routine ending hours later ( 45 minutes for the camera pack) in trikle mode as the led indicate. Nothing gets to warm during this whole deal.

Google West Mountain radio and they have a software-controlled battery evaluation system.. very nice and low cost.

Joe KB9LZB