If any, it’s the 4500 mAh HR-4/3FAU that would be of the most interest. But they don’t look like they are LSD to me, otherwise they’d be bragging about it.
By the way KumaBear, your links seem to be clickable after all.
I’m speaking of protected 18650’s at the moment. They can be compared to laptop/phone/etc batteries, because they even use protection circuits by same manufacturer.
Not really, most protection circuits on normal batteries are dead at around 3.3 volts but protection circuits kick in much later. Also in multicell packs they are balance charged and individually monitored.
Hi cainn!
Thanks for the update - must be some BLF magic.
Best Regards,
Bob
I guess I don’t see the point of these batteries.
Any light or other electronic that would normally take 18650s will be expecting 3.7 average voltage, with overdischarge protection at 2.7 volts or whatever.
Therefore, putting these NiMH into any flashlight will probably not even work, and if it did, would be extremely underpowered even if the driver was really forgiving with a wide input voltage range.
As said, you would need specific flashlights wired to accept these, which would certainly be quite a task and offset any safety advantages gained.
Secondly these batteries are very inefficient. A LiIon 14500 (AA sized) is 3.7 volts at around 800ish mAh? For a total of 3 watt*hours.
A typical NiMH will be 1.2volts at 2000mah = 2.4 watt hours. LiIon is certainly better, but not THAT much better. And that’s for LSD eneloops.
The D batteries that run my TK70 are 10,000 mAh = 12 watt*hour, which is similar to an 18650. And they are real values, low self discharge accu-evolution.
But these pieces of crap are awful! While an 18650 is about 3.5x as strong as a 14500, this 18650-sized turd is only about twice as strong as its NiMH AA counterpart! Thats bad.
I anyone going 2 try and see if these bats are available for retail? or wholesale for that matter.
Like I said earlier, these could be used in a flashlight with the right sort of P60 drop-in. You know, the 0.9v to 4.2v ones. Also, I don’t see how even modding a standard flashlight to somehow accept them would make them potentially volatile like Li-ion cells can be.
But I agree with you about capacity. I don’t think I’d bother with the novelty of it all unless they could provide significantly more than 4500 mAh.
I’m starting to try to find drivers that will handle 1x NiMH to use the 4/3A size cells (roughly the same as a 18650).
Currently trying a driver I just got in from KD identified as “FD-A Boost Current Regulated 0.7v-4.2v 1.6A”
(but so far it isn’t lighting up with a NiMH at 1.35v input, sigh)
(works fine with a li-ion cell)
(I’m using a very old 4/3A NiMH cell (I found one live cell in an old five-cell bike light pack).
So I’m curious if anyone from this old thread actually got those NiMH cells.
For now, I’m ordering a few 4/3A NiMH from
and also a pair of 2/3A NiMH— hoping two of those will fit and give me 2.4+v
What I want is flashlights I can give people who are OK with NiMH but don’t want li-ions.
(Then I can give away some of my old 18650-size flashlights, with NiMH cells (and a pair of magnet-wire-clip extenders for a regular AA-size charger, which work with the larger 4/3A NiMH size)
I pulled Toshiba wrapped 4/3A cells from an ancient laptop pack before...too bad they were all dead.