There’s a reason, in fact. None of the good manufacturers of li-ion cells sell them for individual use.
They are meant to go into battery packs with proper protection circuits and charging systems.
And those protection systems — after a lot of fires from Chinese phones in China and from battery packs from Apple and HP and other big companies — have been fairly well worked out.
We’re not getting those. What we get are cells from good sources via third parties, or cells from fly-by-night builders also via third parties.
Sometimes they add some kind of protection circuitry, or something claimed to be that.
This is why I buy cells from Mtn — he specifies exactly what product is added to what cell.
Cheap electronics fail. Protection circuitry is very thin electronics shrinkwrapped over an original cell.
Remember the “li-ion factory” whose representative came on here — we never tracked down the location of the factory, as far as I know.
Apparently in Shenzen from the userid.
That was at: Review request for HKJ [Rechargeable Batteries] on Wed, 07/08/2015 - 06:05 #676
if you use 300 links per page it’s Review request for HKJ [Rechargeable Batteries]
The rep wrote about the “poor Chinese workers” whose hands were black from handling the chemicals, and wrote that they were always experimenting to try to find some way to improve the cells coming from their factory.
I said at the time that was a recipe for disaster —- you can’t safely change the components and chemicals without long life cycle testing. But you can sure make an extra penny per cell (or, yes, get a higher amperage figure, for a while) by sticking in something a little cheaper than the specification calls for.
Haven’t heard from them lately. Hope they didnt’ blow up.
By the way, this enormous variability in components is one longterm problem with the whole li-ion industry. People don’t know what’s in them, you can’t rely on them being the same product — partly because the good manufacturers are trying hard to make them safer and better; partly because the cut-rate manufacturers are putting all kinds of shit inside the shrinkwraps and selling them.
http://www.google.com/search?q=“lithium-ion”+battery+degradation+recycling+components