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Good Ni-MH Charger and Batteries! - 2008/11/20 04:34
If you are looking for a great set of Ni-MH rechargeable batteries, batteryspace.com is by far the best value. I had been buying my rechargeable batteries at target and best buy for a long time and have always gotten name brand. Most recently I have been using Duracell batteries with a Duracell charger, however after only 1 year of light use they are already unable to power up my camera. I was very surprised by this and started to do some research on rechargeable batteries. What I found out was that the lifetime of a battery can be reduced greatly if charged improperly. I originally thought the name brand charger would be a good one however there is one critical flaw. My OLD CHARGER requires you to put 2 or 4 cells in at a time. The way it works is by putting the same current through both batteries to charge. This is a HUGE problem because if your batteries are not equally discharged (as often happens when you have rechargeables laying around), then one of the batteries will ALWAYS BE OVERCHARGED, effectively ruining that cells lifetime.
The “POWERIZER CH-V3150 Smart Compact Charger for NiMH Battery” (http://www.batteryspace.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=1401) is a far better charger, and actually charges each cell INDEPENDENTLY. It is also far smarter and uses the “negative delta V” method of determining when each cell is charged. This is a great technique that has been in use for high performance radio controlled car batteries for a long time now. It is great to see it finally in a compact, cheap and slick charger for single cells.
I haven’t done any testing with self-discharge or anything. The charger only takes 2 hours to charge 2 batteries, or 4 hours to charge 4 batteries. That’s quick enough that I can just swap out my dead batteries with some others laying around for at least long enough to quickly charge two more. As a college student who plays a lot of XBOX 360 on the weekends this quick charging has saved me from having to stop playing many a time.
Pros: 1. Independent charging for each cell, thereby avoiding the overcharge common with other cheap Ni-MH battery chargers.
2. PRICE! With 8 batteries for under $22 I couldn’t find anywhere that offered a better deal. Just 8 batteries typically would cost more than this!
3. Batteries seem to last just as long in devices as any other Ni-MH batteries I have had, and with this superior charger I expect that they will also have a much longer lifetime.
4. Fast charges! 2 hours for two batteries or 4 hours for four batteries. With the 8 batteries included in this pack, I never run out!
5. Compact and well designed.
Cons: I can’t even come up with anything negative to write down!
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