TOPIC:

Yes, see the earlyer post:

You are making me nervous, Poebe. Are you sure you don't want to strap the batteries with some tape or something? It looks like you'll be picking up batteries of the track.

poebe wrote:

Yes, see the earlyer post:

dangerous. No thermo shrink?

nothing dangerous. i know what i am doing
included heat shrink foil and wire insulation thing shizzle

www.rc-point.nl...45&lang=nl

After some risky business with some chinese batteries from ebay I've come to a conclusion that you get what you pay for. And the less you pay the even lesser you get what you pay for. Which means that in the future I will be buying only the brand names expensive battery packs, though there are some rotten eggs amongst these too. I returned one of my Carson hump back 7,2V due to its weird charging habbits. I should mention that ModelsportUK was very accomodating.

Not having used any of the racing packs for a while, I thought I'd cycle them a bit along with all the penlites I own. I feared the state of the LRP Hyper 5000 somewhat, it being the only NiMH pack I have. But it seems to be in quite good order still. I am currently trying to condition it to deliver its maximum capacity (which it was never really able to for some reason).

I am somewhat confused about charging amperage though. In the manual of the charger it recommends high currents but on the batteries themselves it says the standard charging is 16 hours at 500mA. The latter is the approach my Hama charger uses for the break-in mode so I'm having a go at that for the racing pack as well. Seems to have some effect at least, as it went from outputting 3000 mAh to 3700 mAh. Still not quite what it should be capable of but I am rather glad that they are still in good nick, realising these cells go for about 8 bucks a piece today.

Edit - confusing about this is that the manual also states that NiMH does not like a trickle and that one should turn it off... but 16 hours at 500mA would always trigger the delta peak before that amount of time has been reached so anything beyond that is basically a trickle.

How do you condition the battery ? 
 

jord001 wrote:

How do you condition the battery ? 

 

Discharge followed by charge, IMAX B6 & similar chargers have that as a built in function for 1 to 3 cycles. It's a slow process as the discharge rate is limited to 1A, although I think some later chargers increased this to 3A...

Other alternatives are discharging through resistors, or a number of H4 bulbs. Or of course you could always run it down in a RC car

The idea is to find (or restore) an NiMH packs maximum capacity.

The Maha Powerex charger (for penlites) has a mode called "break-in" for it and the manual describes it as follows:

Applies a 16-hour 0.1C charge (0.1 times the capacity of the battery), rest of one hour, followed by a 0.2C discharge, rest again, and finally a 16-hour 0.1C recharge again.

Recommended for brand-new batteries. This process is also known as “Forming Charge.” Also recommended with batteries that cannot be rescued by the Refresh & Analyze mode.

The same is more or less stated in small print on the LRP cells... which seem to have gained quite a bit of capacity from it.

NiCads I have appear to be in less great shape, but still useable I guess.