It has been awhile since I’ve been here on BLF, but I know that there are a lot of folks here who are familiar with lithium-ion batteries. I have a question about a situation and thought that folks here might know the answer.
I recently received a new camera (it’s a new Sony A7 iv, which was just released), and when I received it, the battery that came with the camera appears to have been completely depleted… the camera would not start with that battery as-received. I did charge it (which I think I realized was probably not a good/safe idea), and it took ~2200+ mAh (the battery is spec’ed as 2280 mAh).
As I said, I realized after-the-fact, that I probably should not have tried to charge it after it had been (apparently pretty much) depleted, but I wanted to check with you all: Is that battery “safe” at this point? Or, if it was you, would you just stop using and dispose of it?
My opinion is that after you’ve charged the battery, if it stays at the normal voltage, it should be fine. If it continues to drop below what it should be, it’s probably bad and should be recycled.
I’ve had a recycled laptop battery that was depleted and after I recharged the batteries, they remained at 4.1+ volts after many months. I still use them many years later.
Although vague, this is a response to a question posed about the NP-FZ100 battery charge status out of the box. Low voltage condition is normal on a new pack according to SONY. Also reading the specs, it appears the cell pack has some protection circuitry.
Enjoy your new camera (WOW!!).
Basically if is has protection circuity then the 0V means the circuitry disconnected the battery so its not actually 0V. Recharging will circuit reactivate the battery.
Now if you had just had the cell and its at 0V then you don’t want to charge it because under 2.5V will cause changes in the battery which can cause future dendrite formation internally. The battery works fine for months or even years but if a dendrite punctures a separator internally then the battery explodes.
Presumably being a battery with protection from a legitimate mainstream manufacturer your okay as it should be the first case that i mentioned above and not the second case.
+1
I have done the same. I would just keep a close eye on it. Make sure its not getting hot while charging. If it gets hot this would mean it has a high internal resistance and should be discarded, warm is okay but hot is not. From my experience (some just last night charging up some batteries that have set to long in flashlights) they will be fine.
I have also salvaged laptop batteries that read zero or close to zero that charged up fine and have worked flawlessly for years.
It seems to me like they need a cycle or two to get back to normal. The thread from our experiences with these laptop batteries is here. FYI - some 'new' Fujitsu laptop batteries
I wouldn’t recommend charging the battery unatended.
Edited: ohaya, I just realized it was you that started this great experiment in that link. You must have been away too long, I didn’t realize it was you until I went back to the first post in this thread.
Wow, congrats on a new really nice camera! I had to look it up and then nosed around a little on the product page & info.
Seems counter intuitive to us single-round-cell folks but apparently Sony says this is normal and ok. Who knows what they might have inside that pack but I’d say run with it, maybe keep an eye on it in case the casing starts to bulge a little or feels too warm during charging if you interrupt it to pull it out for a check. For what it’s worth, years ago I had some small li-ion Nikon packs that went totally flat after a year and a half unused and with a partial charge. External charger but they seemed to bounce back just fine and then one of them started to bulge a little (would still fit in the compartment but was a little effort to remove). Those already had a few hundred cycles on them and I kept using them for quite awhile longer, no problems at all. Wouldn’t hurt to contact Sony to confirm.
Correllux - I actually did chat with Sony support, before I posted here, and they WERE surprised about the battery being depleted, and the person I chatted with said that was not “normal”, and that their QA should’ve caught it. Then he said that he thought it was still ok, which quite frankly, got me a little upset.
Also, FYI, I didn’t try measuring the battery voltage before charging it, so I don’t know what the voltage was - in hindsight, I probably should’ve done that.
Anyway, another person just reported that the camera that they received also had a depleted battery, so that makes 3 reported (incl myself) so far.
TIFisher - which spec did you see that said that the battery has protection?
I spoke to Mooch about this some months back and he said once a cell has discharged below the 2.5v rating (or whatever the rating is), no one can know the internal state to be able to guarantee that it’s “safe”.
Interesting…but at least maybe that clears it up and they just have a supply problem or something on the manufacturing line that can be quickly addressed. I’m sure they’ll take care of you, hopefully without much hassle.
I’ve used Canon batteries that were sitting at 0v for some time. Bought the camera used.
The DSLR has a battery quality icon of some sort. 3 out of 4 showed good and one fair (don’t actually remember if it was a set of bars or whatever).
They have been working OK for the last year or so. Don’t hold a charge as well as a fresh battery.
BUT
I do charge then outside of the camera!
All the Best,
Jeff
B&H (the camera seller) has ok’ed an exchange, but they are out of stock, so I would have to wait until they get more inventory… no date for that was provided.
I bought and received a new Nitecore USN4 charger for the NP-FZ100 batteries. That charger does a health test on the batteries (it is a dual battery charger) before charging, and also displays the results of the health check, and for this battery, it said it was “Good”.
There was another forum user on the DPreview thread that reported receiving a camera with a depleted battery (so that is 3 reported, including myself).
I’ve been thinking a lot about this and also researching and have posted at several forums. To be clear, for this situation, at high level the battery itself is not the major concern, to me, but I am more concerned whether or not the CAMERA is all ok. I’ve been doing some testing/shooting with it, both with the battery that came with the camera (the one what was depleted) and with several other NP-FZ100 batteries that I already had, and camera seems to be working fine.
Also, as I said above the Nitecore USN4 charger said the battery was “Good”, and I have charged the battery, both with the USN4 and in-camera, and the battery does charge. One of the charges, I was measuring the mAh, and the battery did take almost the advertised capacity (2280 mAh). When I charged with the USN4, the charger was showing about 1000 mA current and the battery did get a little warm (< 100F) and the charger a little warmer (< 130F), but I checked with another user who had the USN4 and although he wasn’t able to measure temps, he said that the charger did get hot at the same place (right under where the battery was in the charge) and the battery did get less hot than the charger.
I think I have some time to return the camera, so I am going to do more testing with it, both with the one battery and my other batteries, and if everything still looks ok, I think that I will just keep the camera instead of doing an exchange. If I do encounter any problems, then I will have to assess whether I should go ahead and do the exchange.
I didn’t even know Nitecore got into that arena of specialized chargers.
I think it it were me, I’d first ask Sony to have someone in tech/engineering to get in touch with you…or perhaps an actual service tech. And I would also try to get in touch with one or two factory or independent service techs out in the real world to see if they had input. If the slide rule fellas think there’s a problem then maybe you’ll score a free battery replacement rather than having to go through the hassle of returning the whole kit to B&H.
If you still have an older camera that you know well, maybe you could put the new battery in there and see how it performs with multiple flash shots or taking video? I wonder if anyone has done a tear down and circuit review of those packs…could be interesting to see what all they have going on in there if it’s more than a simple voltage and resistance feed to the brain.
The folks at BH are really great. I’ve been buying from them since before the Web.
Every now and then something isn’t right with an order, they always made things good.
All the Best,
Jeff
I had emailed Nitecore support over the weekend, and they responded this morning (or maybe last night ):
I have been using the new battery in my rotation, charging and using it in the camera and watching how it behaves, and given Nitecore’s response, I think that I am leaning to just keeping and using the camera and battery.
):