Charging D Cell NIMH

I want to move away from alkaline towards nimh on my D cell powered fishing equipment and am interested in finding a cost effective charger. My first impulse was to pick up one of the converters for my maha c9000, but I’ve read that getting a complete charge in one go around is hit and miss from charger to charger. I don’t want to have to start the charger up several times to bring a D cell to full charge.

I’m currently looking at the 2016 version of Nitecores i2 Intellicharger because it is well under my $30-40 target and after reading about it on Mr. Jensen’s website, it seems like it will charge correctly.

I don’t care about speed or number of battery capacity, as it won’t be used often and there will be sufficient time to get the 12 batteries it will support up to capacity.

Should I be looking at a different charger for my purposes, or is the i2 a good fit, considering my budget, intended use, and charger performance?

I too use some NiMH D cells in radios and some lights. Two chargers I recently aquired that work great for NiMH D cells are the XTAR VC4 and the XTAR SV2. They both will charge only two D cells at a time but I’ve been very pleased with them.

The VC4 works the slowest but charges the cells to full capacity every time. The SV2 is a fast charger and charges the cells fairly quickly without heating up the cells. I highly recommend both for NiMH AAA, AA, C & D cells.

What would be a full charge reading on a mm after taking the battery of the charger?

At the risk of taking this to a new direction, I chose the alternate path of using converters that accept 3 AA NiMH in parallel into a shell that is D size. Using 2450 mah LSD cells the capacity is fine, and the expense using IKEA AA is not prohibitive.

I to have gone to the D shell holders. But I got the 2aa to d I wish I’d gotten the three. But didn’t see them at the time. But for about $5 for 8 holders piles of aa cells had new life instead of having to purchase new cells.

Any charger that can accept a 32650 cell and do nihm will accept your d size cell.

I’d go with the xstar. Better quality build then nitecores IMO. The new nitecores seem ok. Xstar has a decent warranty to

Depends on when you take the reading. Right at termination 1.5 but falls to 1.4 rather quickly. Usually by the time I check the charger and there done there already at 1.43-1.45 Then over the next couple days will fall into the 1.3 range and stay there awhile. Before settling a little lower.

Voltage readings on NiMh are pretty approximate. For a full charge on NiMh D’s my experience is similar to Speed4goal.

I have one of those converters to charge D cells in a AA charger. It’s kind of clunky and unstable. It works but I don’t much like it. For routine charging I don’t consider it a good solution. It’s more like a special but poor tool.

I use my Xtar SV2 to charge my 3 cell AA to D adaptors with Eneloops at 2 amps. I love this charger although I wish it had real-time voltage readout instead of percentage.

Have you found those 3xAA>D converters to be decent and reliable? I have some but haven’t put them to work yet as I still have a number of old D’s I’m using up.

Very reliable. The build quality is far superior to the 2 cell adapters I have. The only downside is they’re a lot more expensive and harder to find. That’s based on when I purchased them a couple of years ago.

Edit: One thing to note, the most common 3 AA to D adapters are in series instead of parallel

I won’t comment on long-term durability or reliability, but if you search for 3AA to D adapter on ebay you can find them for under a buck each. Pick up a couple of spares and it should be OK.

I see. They came way down in price since I purchased mine, and a lot more plentiful. I’m going to order more. Thanks for the heads up :slight_smile:

When the 3 aa cell are in the adapters, do they still have the 1.2 volts or does it now have the 1.2 volts x 3 (3.6v) per adapter?

A word of warning from my own experience:

[originally posted on CPF]

You can get them in either configuration. Parallel for 1.2V in total, but 3 times the output current, or series for 3.6V in total at normal current.

Sellers have been known to accidentally send one type when they were supposed to send the other, so load your shiny new adaptors with some cells and check the output voltage with a voltmeter before you put them in any equipment you care about.

I’ve also seen one from Gearbest with the positive and negative markings back to front, so it produced a voltage with reverse polarity. Caveat emptor.

@ Phlogiston

Thanks for the reply!

Thanks for all of the replies!