I have some old rayovac hybrids, about 8 years old, they lose half their charge in 2-3 months and don’t handle voltage sag nearly was well as they used to, i bought them in 2005 and they saw heavy use for the first few years, but very little in the last 3. They were supposed to have similar low self discharge characteristics as eneloops. Mind you they were rayovac charger dumb charged to very hot temps for maybe 100 cycles (the ‘proper’ charger they came with)
How old and how like new are your oldest eneloops performing? Also estimate the number of cycles on them and how much they were abused.
Bought two sets in around 2006 or 2007 (when they were first released) for use in a Canon S3IS camera I got for my elderly Mum. Always charged in the cheap dumb Eneloop charger (timer based) they came with.
I would guess they probably average only 2 or 3 cycles per year so maybe 20 cycles. Very low use by our standards!
I ran a refresh and analyse on them using my C9000 a few months back and they came up in the 1800s and all within about 50mAh of each other. Don't have the exact figures to hand.
I can't give statistics regarding self-discharge for these but I have never heard Mum complain that they've "gone flat" sitting in the camera bag.
Very good investment in my opinion and I can rest assured that Mum will always have a working camera without worrying about having to charge it the day before she needs it.
I have 2nd gen AA and AAA Eneloops. I charge them with Sanyo charger they came with. They usually read 1.43V fresh off the charger and settle down to 1.37V after a while.
AA get used every night and are run down to 1.25V or so. I charge them every day. In 8 months they have about 250 cycles on them.
AAA get used every night and are down to about 1.28 or so every week. I charge them once a week. In 8 months they have about 35 cycles on them.
All my batteries are charged with a small 4” fan blowing on batteries and charger.
I haven’t noticed any degradation or problems. Then again they never get hot and aren’t subject to high discharge / recharge rates.
My first Eneloops came from Aug 07. I used them in my flash units taking wedding pictures. They’d get worked, hard. Typically, in a Canon 580 EX they’s see some 500-700 flashes and get swapped, and be really hot coming out of the unit. Might not have gotten used but 10 times a year, but they got used hard when they did.
Those are now relegated to my 6 yr olds game device. Again, he’ll sometimes use that til they die and swap in a new set. (he uses it when we’re on the road, so for several hours at a time)
They’re still working fine, can’t say how much capacity they have now vs then.
Yeah Im not sure why Energizers have a bad rap, Ive been boiling mine (2450’s and 2500’s) for years on the dumb charger they came with, and they still kick on fine. Could do with cycling a few times I imagine, and I assume there is some damage, but not so much you notice it. I also have the black Energizer charger that holds 4 batts in a case (and has 2 cases, total 8 batteries), which slot almost upright in the charger base. Red light charging, green light cooked.
7 out of 8 died. My son shortcircuited 4 of them by putting them in the same toy (2 each times) in reverse polarity. Was a cheap $2 chinese toy.
2 of them had a ‘smell’ which I found suspicious. With no way to analyse them, I dumped them.
The last one ‘died’ last week when a bad connection in a multiplug short circuited my cheap ebay charger and both the charger and the cell were smelling toast.
I only have a 4yr old one and 4 remaining ones I got from ChibiM at the moment
Oh yeah my eneloops must have had over 500 recharges easy.
I bought about 24 of them in 2009 to use in my camera's flash as well, but now I use them in everything! I haven't kept good track of them at all but I'm guessing that many of them only have around 10 cycles on them, there are a few that have 40+ cycles that I use in my AA headlamp. At first I was using the 4 bay Eneloop charger, lately I've been using my Nitecore i4 which seems to do a pretty good job even though I've heard of some running the cells hot mine doesn't seem to.
All of them hold a good charge, I can leave them in a device for years and it still works! These were a revelation to me when I found them because all the previous NiMH cells I'd used were no good because of the fast self-discharge rate. Even if these aren't quite as high capacity as some of the others they are worth it to me because they work without babysitting and are a true replacement for alkalines.
I’ve had to rein in that habit, i now offer to sell or buy people an item i have that they like because i buy plenty for myself and end up with nothing left
All my Eneloops seem to behave more or less like new. I have a few dozen, but none are more than ~2.5 years old, and they don’t get cycled very quickly. Even in lights I use daily, they last at least a month per charge, so that’s a maximum of 20 or 30 charges in the time I’ve had them.
At this rate, it looks like I won’t need to buy NiMH batteries for a long, long time.
I’ve been using a La Crosse BC-700 charger, and I try to run the Eneloops down all the way before charging them, to avoid any potential memory effect. I also keep the charger unplugged while not in use.
I’ve also got a few Energizer LSD cells (bought before I discovered Eneloops), and have no complaints. I mostly only use them in devices where I don’t care much about battery performance though.
Before this, I had a bunch of PowerEX cells and a MH-C401FS charger. They were nice at first (at least for high-drain devices), but they self-discharged in a month or two and none of them still have enough capacity to be useful. The batteries ranged from about 3 to 10 years old when I finally dumped them, but I had mostly stopped using them by then. The charger lost its “magic smoke” about 2 or 3 years ago, after being plugged in 24/7 and used occasionally for about a decade.
I am surprised that no one has replied with more then 1000 cycles on their batteries, i have some duracells (that coincidentally appear to be duraloops from about 4 years ago, well before i heard of duraloops) with maybe 300 cycles and are doing fine, but are used in a camera and GPS so not high draw.
I would enjoy seeing some testing on eneloops with 1000 discharges at 1-2C and testing their voltage sag, capacity and self discharge rate.
Given that they've only been available for around seven years trying to get 1000 cycles on them by now would be pretty ambitious. Rough napkin maths tells me that would require they'd been through a full cycle approximately every 2 1/2 days since purchase, and that is assuming they were first generation Eneloops.
I think there is a tendency for enthusiast groups such as ours to get caught up in the specifications and sometimes not face the reality that we really don't need the life cycles that are claimed. In all likelihood my Eneloop cells will outlive me as long as I keep using them at the current rate, don't insanely abuse them and keep charging them with a decent charger.
I bought a half dozen 8-packs of Eneloops on sale at Radio Shack in 2006 when they decided to stop stocking them. I’ve only opened about 3 of those packs, but they don’t seem to perform any different today than when I first charged them. They’re white, I have no idea what ‘generation’ they might be.
I do keep them in matched sets (I’ve numbered them with indelible marker to keep them sorted), and I usually run them till they quit before recharging, but I don’t keep track of the number of cycles. They all still hold about 1900 mAh, and so far none have failed or gone measurably ‘out of synch’ with their mates. Mine are used in flashlights, radios, and digital cameras. None are in toys.
