$26.93 La Crosse Technology BC-700 Alpha Power Battery Charger

[Bort]

@Metalophile

I have two beefs with mine:

One is that it often times misses the termination point. Have had 2200 mAH batteries terminate over 3000 mAH several times. I know this overcharging is killing my batteries.

Other beef is that often times after I take charged batteries out and put in another battery to charge, it goes into some limbo mode where it displays 3 blinking two digit numbers with one LCD being blank. I think the AC adapter isn’t up to par, but when I e-mailed LaCrosse they said it was not a malfunction, yet I can’t charge batteries when it’s in that state. I have to unplug it, wait a couple of hours, then it might work when I plug it in again.

The first problem can be solved by some human intervention, if it gets over 1.52 volts after an hour i yank the battery out, and put it back in the charger and it will read them as full or finish charging it. I think they should incorporate an automated way to do this to not miss termination points
Your second problem is a strange one.

[agenthex]

I’ve only had termination issues (on rare occasion) with poorer quality cells. Not sure if it happens in other chargers since there’s no capacity measurement on those, but in any case probably not the best idea to charge the cheapies on this charger.

[ChiggerPepi]

I once left mine charging some cheapie AAs and found it at 1.65v and scorching hot batteries. It had put over 3000ma in these crappy things…. oops? How does this happen?

[PilotPTK]

@ChiggerPepi

I once left mine charging some cheapie AAs and found it at 1.65v and scorching hot batteries. It had put over 3000ma in these crappy things…. oops? How does this happen?

Very poor charger design - that’s how…

Any charger that can’t terminate properly will never be inside my home. Ever.

PPtk

[agenthex]

What’s a bit odd is that this charger has temperature sensors.