Noticed eBay has eneloop lites for reasonable prices shipped from lithuania. Think they are legit? I like the idea of lower capacity that’s why I use rayovac aaa instead of eneloop mostly.
Does anyone know the expected lifespan of Eneloops when they’re only run through a few cycles per year? How are older cells holding up under these conditions?
Yeah, we’re still figuring that one out. I have several Eneloops from the year they came out (2006), and they’re all still good. Maybe lost 5–10 of their capacity. They have somewhere between 100-200 cycles on them.
Out of over 300 Eneloops, I’ve only had 1 cell go bad on me for no reason. It’s from 2009. Still works, but has very high internal resistance and only 1300mAh capcity (at a low discharge rate). I’ve had 2 others go bad the same way, but that is from too many cycles (several hundred cycles).
Anyway, in general, you should easily expect 10 years out of your cells if you only cycle them 1 or 2 dozen times per year. I expect the real answer will be closer to 20 years, but I’ll have to wait another 7 years to see.
Once the cells go bad, they’re no good for high-drain applications (like flashlights), but they’re still fine for low-drain stuff, like remote controls.
I’ve got 4 Sony LSD AAA batteries ( NH-AAA-B4GN 840mAh), that are rewrapped 1st and 2nd gen Eneloop PRO batteries according to eneloop101 website. Recently, these batteries stopped being charged by my Panasonic BQ-CC17 smart charger (charging leds keep flashing), which usually means the internal resistance of these batteries is too high. Unless I got counterfeit batteries, this shouldn’t have happened, because I purchased them in September 2016 and they have always been charged with the aforementioned smart charger.
I’m aware of the trick of doing an initial charge with a dumb charger and then completing the charge with a smart one so it will not reject the sick batteries. However, this trick has been not working with a Panasonic cordless phone charger, that can output 6.0V/400mA. I charge the batteries on the cordless phone charger and some hours later the batteries are supposedly charged, but only a few minutes after charging them with the BQ-CC17, the leds start flashing and charging stops.
My question is: is the trick not working just because I’m using a cordless phone charger, or even a dumb charger won’t be able to prevent the Panasonic charger from rejecting the batteries? I wonder whether the BQ-CC17 is a very picky charger or the Sony batteries are really sick even after less than three years of use and being properly cared. It would suck to buy a dumb charger and find out that the smart one will still reject the batteries.