One of the guys I work with brought in a Trustfire light with a Ultrafire BRC 4800mah battery. I sent him some articles on how dangerous they were and he immediately tossed it. I gave him some Sanyo laptop pulls (measured at about 2000mah) and he was totally amazed at the increased runtime. Another guy had a Ultrafire 14500 in his sk68 that had a runtime of about 5 minutes. I tested it at home and it measured out at 100mah. Gave him an A&W I had lying around and he was also impressed by the increased runtime.
Both are technical guys (a DBA and a network engineer) so luckily they were open to articles and reasoning. Took less than 5 minutes for them to see the light (pun intended :laughing:
I sure hope someone at Tesla sees this. They can cut-down on the number of cells they need by 1/3. I bet it also sags less and has a longer cycle life. I see on one site that 9 sucker buyers have already jumped on it.
BRC stands for anything you’d like it to mean really, since the entire wrapper is nonsensical: it does not really pertain to the battery inside at all, its just a wrapper purchased in mass quantities and shrinkwrapped over old cells or phoney cells with a capacitor in them in some cases.
I like to say it stands for “Brick” though: not only are they really bad capacity and cant deliver much current, but they also fail quickly and you get really few recharges before the dropoff in capacity renders them useless…when you buy these they’ll be bricks soon enough.
Our company has a container for battery disposal, which is where he put them. It’s picked up along with our used desktops, laptops, and other hardware. After that I have no idea what happens to the stuff. I suppose it’s possible that the batteries will come back as “ultrafires”
