Ikea Ladda NiMh cells overcharged?

I picked up a 4 pack of the Ikea Ladda high capacity NiMh cells 6 or 8 months ago. They’re only used in my Xbox One controller.

Today I charged the 4 cells on my La Crosse BC700, which I’ve had for probably 10 years now. I noticed that the charger terminated one of the cells at 2.72 Ah and the other 3 at 3.03 Ah. Normally I see 2.4X Ah for the Ladda’s and 1.8 to 2.1 Ah for regular Eneloops.

I suppose the charger is acting up, right? The Ladda’s are only supposed to have a capacity of 2.4 Ah I believe.

What was your charge setting? Sounds like it was either:

- set too low and missed termination. Stock 200mA setting is too low. Try 500 or 700.

- or, old Ladda with a higher internal resistance. I’ve found NiMh gets “sluggish” if not used for a long time or used at very low discharge rates.

  • maybe a bit of both.

Try cycling them: I’d use 350 discharge/700 charge. Might make a big difference.

I’ve had the LC BC-700 for exactly 8 years and I’ve had missed terminations with it the past, as well having it thermally shut down charging due to ‘heat build up’ dozens of times.

I bought the Maha C-9000 at the same time and I’ve never had a problem.

I still use my BC-700, but only when I’m charging up a lot of batteries at once.

Chris

I have one also. Primarily use it for AAA. When doing AA I almost always bump it up to 500 or 700.
I do have a few cells that the IR is high with termination issues, so I may do those at 200 and watch. If they go over they don’t heat much at 200 and it’s no big deal anyway. Those are not long before they get recycled.

Thanks for the responses, guys.

I try to always set the charge current to 700 mA for Eneloop and Ladda AA cells. Maybe every every two or three months I’ll do a Discharge/Refresh cycle.

The age of the cells is a good point. I know I bought them last summer, but judging by the sheer amount of batteries that Ikea keeps in stock, these may have sat around for awhile. There is something embossed into the cells wrapper that looks like a date code (1846). So maybe the 46th week of 2018?

A few times I’ve noticed the batteries have gotten really hot, but I don’t know if that was what caused the charge termination. This is the first time I’ve had the charger grossly overcharge the cells. I’ll have to look into the Maha charger as a replacement.

I think any charger, given the right (wrong?) conditions can miss termination on NiMh. NiMh is MUCH harder to get a ‘proper’ charge on than LiOn. But, mostly it’s not as dangerous if it messes up.