So you cant just buy a battery and charge it? You have to differentiate bet ween different types of NiMH charger or you will kill the battery? That is AMAZING!
Especially when Costco doesnt even sell chargers for their Eneloops (mine a re either light or dark blue with no explanation of what is the difference) and makes no recommendations as to charging. Not to mention, how do I figu re out how to charge (for example) a Reyzel without spending a fortune on t he tester? Or is it generally OK to trickle charge any battery so long as y ou dont mind waiting?
So maybe I DO have to buy Panasonic rechargeables to work properly in a Pan asonic phone, assuming there aren't fakes out there! Or possibly the trickl e charge from the base may well do the trick?
Oh and one other thing, I am not a troll but just checked the charger I am actually using (and dont remember when I accidentally switched) but this on e IS a NiCAD!!! So I assume the Eneloops are now dead for all practical pur poses. Anyway I can now stop blaming the remote controller.
Can I buy some sort of aa/aaa trickle charger to do the job in future?
Yep. It looks simpler if you try to understand how it all works.
Correct. Different chemistries want different types of charging systems, charge rates, EoC (end of charge) detection methods, etc. There's quite a bit of technology inside some chargers to guess what flavor of battery their expected to charge, but at best, it's still a guess.
Yep. That's about it.
Costco isn't exactly a full service operation. If you don't like it, or prematurely kill it for some reason, just take it back and kill some more cells. Incidentally, the pack of Eneloop batteries I purchased at Costco did include the proper charger.
If you can determine the chemistry of the Reyzel thing, you can then determine if it will survive a fast charge, and select your battery charger accordingly. I did some Googling and couldn't find anything on a Reyzel battery.
Also, a discharge tester won't show you how to test the battery. It will only show the capacity of the cell, assuming that you charged it correctly.
Well, the general idea is to:
Follow the manufacturers recommendations.
Don't overcharge
Don't overheat The problem is knowing when to stop charging which implies that you need to know the starting SoC. If you discharge a battery to some low reference point, and calculate how many amp-hrs you'll need to get to about 125% of full charge, you'll probably do ok with a C/10 charge. For a 2000 ma-hr cell, C/10 would be a 200 ma charge current for about
12.5 hrs.
However, that's not going to happen in real life. The starting point might be half charge or even 90% charge. If you apply a C/10 charge for 12.5 hrs to one of those, you've overcharged the battery. Good chargers have EoC (end of charge) detection circuits that look for a tiny dip in voltage when the battery is fully charged. However, they can be fooled by a variety of tricks, such as trying to charge a fully charged battery.
In short, you're probably ok slow charging almost any NiMH battery, as long as you don't overcharge or overheat.
I have several older Panasonic cordless phones that use AAA packs. They've lasted perhaps 6 years per pack in continuous charge while the handset is in the cradle. The trick they use is that they don't charge to 100.0%. My guess(tm) is that they float charge to about 80% of full charge, and stop (based on my measurements of the terminal voltage). The charging systems seems to be designed for long battery life, at the expense of talk time. That's quite the opposite of the usual advertised battery claims, where maximum capacity and extremely fast charge times, are the norm. With NiMH in a cordless phone, if you don't fully charge, and you don't go through many charge/discharge cycles, the batteries can last nearly forever.
Trickle charge (Can I buy some sort of aa/aaa trickle charger to do the job in future?
For Eneloop, you could play it safe and get the Sanyo recommended NC-MQR04 or NC-MQR06 charger. The NC-MQR06 is advertised as a "quick" charger if you consider: single AA 1.5 hrs two AA 4.0 hrs four AA 8.9 hrs to be "quick".
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I would recommend the MAHA MH-C9000 charger. It's no longer modestly priced, but it does all sorts of stuff (such as breaking in and reconditioning), and you can set the charge current as you wish.
More: Read section on "Overnight Charging". Note that this doesn't mean leaving the battery on charge forever, just overnight.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Well I have tended to leave the Eneloops in the NiCAD charger, thinking tha t it was a NiMH charger and that it had a cut out circuit in it. For days o r weeks on end.
Clearly they are dead now and I would imagine I will find that they can loo k as if they are charging to full (or is it just a surface charge?) but in reality they will lose all their charge quickly now even if left out of the remote. And cant be reconditioned
No, they didn't come with any charger, which with no charge instructions wa s a bit of a mistake on the part of Costco?
Incidentally, what does battery recondition mean? Does it mean feeding a s hort burst of 120v reverse polarity to bust up crystals or is that a myth?
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