Got a promotional price from one of those “Amazon deals” websites - $11.96/4pc for 25R or HE2 batteries. I bought a bunch. That price is right at the edge where I wonder, “Is the cheap price more likely due to the promotional price, or are they counterfeits?”
$3/cell as a promotional price is not totally unreasonable, you can currently buy 25R at $2.85/ea as a “retail” customer if you buy MOQ=1000pc. (imrbatteries.com)
I’m going with… 70% odds they are fake. I’ll update this thread with results in a couple days.
And coming through Amazon, I have no doubts that if they are counterfeit then Amazon will RMA them with no issues and I’ll get every penny back with no fuss. If they are real, I got a nice deal on some decent cells.
And for those that are concerned about “taking advantage” of Amazon by placing an order while knowing there is a chance of fakes and simultaneously expecting to return any counterfeit product I receive, don’t worry: I’ve dealt with Amazon from the seller side; Amazon will not lose a penny. All costs associated with counterfeit goods will be pushed back to the seller (of said counterfeit goods). And if you think I’m “taking advantage” of someone who is trying to scam sell counterfeit batteries… well, you and I just are going to have to disagree on that one, I don’t feel any remorse for someone in the scam/counterfeit business.
The 25R are sorta outdated and I’ve bought them from sites like imrbattery for as low as $3.50 a cell. I don’t trust amazon for batteries though so who is really to say?
care to elaborate?
i have put a ton of he2 in versapak sticks and some of the tools are very hard on them.not one has failed or showed any degradation.
you may have gotten fakes.
he2 /he4 nearly the same.
have not seen any failures of those either.
i only have 6 so small sample size.
in your case still most likely fakes(was a big problem when they were in short supply)
or maybe a bad batch.
i bought mine about a year ago from my local reputable online store. it kindda heavy & capacity when it full seems accurate so i can only assume its genuine. i’m not expert in testing battery but for sure it died in short time maybe only 6 months or so it overheats while charging without reaching 100% it will be stuck at 99% and overheats till it breaks. i no longer use he4 ever since. btw i use soshine H4 charger.
maybe u are right? I got this post off a thread this evening:
Tom, my box read 21500 for 7417.5 lumens, I pulled the 4 LG HE4 cells to charge and double check and one of them is dead, won’t charge in any charger I have
I know the guy who had the dead cell and he mostly buys from Mountain. Can’t say for sure however. I don’t want it to be true cuz I use (4) HE4s in my Meteor M43.
4 of my HE4 for sure died prematurely and all died not the same day but all 4 died the same way overheating. It will continue charging until it gets extremely hot and break just like that. I did try prevent them from fully charge & it is usable but when u leave it in the charger to get a 100% charge it will die for sure. Am not sure why it happens but if someone experience the same or knows what happen would be good knowledge for me.
Dump the charger. From what you're claiming I can guess your battery charger is overheating and possibly overvolting to some degree your cells. Just going beyond 14/15th of maximum cell voltage starts inducing additional voltage related stresses on li-ion batteries, but this is no widespread wisdom in a consumer market usually focused on performance. This is the main reason laptop batteries die prematurely or with a very reduced amount of cycles despite long life.
In Europe we can get the Samsung 25R for 3.4€/piece.
Considering the terrible pricing policy in the EU, I don’t see why the Amazon’s deal won’t refer to genuine batteries.
I have been using the same charger for my MJ1, MH1, VTC6, 30Q, HG2, GA, NCR, OLIGHT, KEEPPOWER batteries without overheating problem. However I did notice when slot my fully charged battery using my XTAR SV2 Rocket charger into my SOSHINE H4 it will still show only 99% charged and charges a little more before it display 100%. Does that mean the charger is bad or overcharging batteries??
myflashguy, I can't say for sure if any of your chargers is overcharging (overvolting) your batteries. The standard for 4.2V cells usually is 4.2±0.05V. Peeking at HKJ's tests graphs seems to me the H4 terminated cells at 4.2V while the SV2 Rocket looks like at 4.19V, so the behaviour you describe is normal. In fact, it is very unlikely that two different chargers will terminate exactly at the same voltage and current, so the final cell resting voltage will differ nearly for sure.
Get a proper multimeter to determine the actual voltage of your cells, there are many good, portable and inexpensive ones. There is a flash sale for the Uni-T UT120A going on in GearBest right now, saw it earlier while looking for a Lii-100 code.
With regards to your particular issue with HE4s, if the cells aren't being charged insanely fast and they get particularly hot while at it I can only guess they're damaged, my advice thus is to recycle (dump) them.
According to HKJ’s review of the Soshine H4, the charge does not appear to completely terminate when the batteries are full. This is a problem, especially if you are leaving the batteries on the charger after they are complete (like overnight charging).
As long as the charger isn't raising the charge voltage above the standards non-terminating is not a problem, SoCalTiger. It would be if the charger were raising the voltage above the maximum standard; this is done by some chargers to reduce charging time a bit, but in this case it really needs a value of current termination inversely proportional to cell internal resistance to avoid overcharging, a problem of magnitude with these cheap devices.
The Mastech MS2030 is a clamp meter, particularly good to measure current through the clamp with minimal voltage drop, something critical when you just cannot afford to drop nearly any voltage like when doing flashlight tailcap readings. Here's a video I found of the MS2108:
