The standard 1A discharge should be enough for a test.
I have done this quite often when I bought a dozen of cheap LSD. But I also did not capture the voltage because I was to lazy. That’s a dumb mistake I wouldn’t do again.
I would really like a hobbycharger with sd card instead of serial connection. That would make things easier.
So all I have is the feeling how fast the voltage drops and on the cheap aldi/lidl cells I see that clearly. If they are a year old and have 30cycles even worse.
Not sure how these laddas behave, but the ikea products are not bad. They also have some promising led bulbs for reasonable prices. And funny that this is probably the only store which exists everywhere…
If you consider all the prevented waste if you can replace hundreds of AAs with one AA I am always happy that there are cheaper options out there, because this gives a kind of buying impulse to a lot of people who would never buy eneloops.
I will do initial capacity tests on my maha. 200mAh discharge for the AAA (running now) and 500mAh for the AA.
After that I will do a break in to charge them.
I have no output cable to connect my accucel with a computer, but I will look for timelape software and let it capture a picture every 5 minutes. I think this will provide enough data about the voltage drop.
Although my accucel isn’t 100% accurate, it’s better than nothing.
And indeed. My intention with these batteries are as an alkaline replacement.
If they can keep up enough of their charge for 6 months to a year they are a good enough replacement for me for simple electronic devices. They will not have to power my digital camera or something
I stopped making cycles. The aa ended up with a total of 2300 mah, mesured at a discharge of .5 and .7A (max of my charger)
Willing to see full tests from HKJ on these
no, it is discharge capacity. Im using a bc700 charger, (but i made i mistake when posting, the discharge currents were .25 and .35A. I posted the charging capacities, the results are for that currents)
It seems pretty accurate, im geeing about 2000-2100 with 3gen eneloops
it just finished the last cell, which was discharging at.1A, but the value in this one was lower, 2.13A. I suppose the temp variation had something to do with that, the other tests were done when the house was warmer.
this was the fourth cycle, in the fist one the values were a bit lower than 2000
I can’t make a discharge test with higher current, but I´m going to check the difference in brightness of my EA4 when powered with these and with eneloops (edit: to see if the can provide at least the current needed by that light. If so, they are good enough for me)
1550mAh avg, 2000 claimed 77.5% left after 5 months
AAA ones: 606mAh avg (left the 500mAh discharged one out of the calculation), 750mAh claimed so 80,8% left after 2 months
Break in on the AA’s is now running so it’ll take a couple of days before I can do further testing.
I did already saw that the last minutes the voltage drop was pretty significant.
When I looked I saw some discharge rate around 1450mAh and a voltage of 1.06… around 15 minutes later the batts were done and thus 0.9V under a load of 500mA. More precise measurements will be taken once the break in is finished.
I will use datapoints from my accucel 6 and will attach my multimeter as well since there is a voltage difference between them (around 0.1V for lithiums, don’t know for nimh) so this will provide 2 reference points
Thanks for this
I understood you are making the calculations of that loss assuming they came from factory with those 2Ah, but the initial charge has to be lower. In my first charge i got only 1.9Ah, and after 4 cycles it increased almost 400mAh. I think the long term storage tests must be done after break-in capacity measurements, and not based in claimed capacity
It is really difficult to measure discharge capacity with BC700/BC900 in discharge mode without monitoring the display all the time. The moment a battery is exhausted the display starts from zero and counts charge capacity as it starts charging automatically. When finished it shows charge capacity, not what we are interested in!
I always use Refresh Mode to measure discharge capacity as the display will keep the result for the last discharge cycle.
Yeah, I wanted to add but see I forgot
“Assuming they came with the claimed capacity from the factory”
I am planning to do long term storage tests, but since those take months to complete this is the only bit of LSD info there is right now. And in my opinion 75% after 6 months would already make them suitable enough and better alkaline alternative than regular rechargeables.
And for as far as my understanding of LSD’s goes, self discharge should become lower the less capacity they have.
So if they would do for example 75% in 6 months, 70% in 1 year and 60% in 2 years they would still be great for clocks and remotes and such.
But time will tell. Batteries are labeled with numbers so further results will be compared against the same battery every time.
Okay, test results gonna take a bit more time.
Apparently the power plug of my maha c9000 became very sensitive to movement and my c9000 resetted during the discharge I don’t know how far it already was, so I’m doing a 400mA discharge now and will restart the break-in after that.
Ah well, a day waisted but another cycle on them so hopefully this will also produce a higher capacity.
Here are the results of the break in test on the AA’s
1: 2090
2: 2077
3: 2063
4: 2125
2088 avg
Don’t know why #4 is that far of from the rest, but at least the capacity is more than claimed.
Break in on the AAA’s is now running.
I’m doing a discharge test on some other batteries right now, so will do the load test later if there is still time or tomorrow.
Will also need to find a better way to monitor, as my webcams aren’t able to capture the accucel 6’s screen. Shows up as 1 blue lightbar. Or maybe I will only monitor multimeter voltages
Will also do a eneloop discharge test to compare the results to this charger.
Thank’s very much Johnny for the test results. I’m having six packs of theese on my christmas wish list for replacing several alkalines in the household. I guess I don’t have to panic erase that wish list so far.
