strulag

My Feedback: (-1)

I just bought a 6V NIMH 1200mah batterie and it says on it to "Charge before use at 100-125mA for 16-20 hrs". Well I put it on my Triton at 100mA and it only charged for 13 hrs which put 1204 mA into it. After the fact I found out that you're not supposed to charge a NIMH on a peak charger for the first charge since the voltage curve is very different and the peak charger doesn't detect it right.

My question is what should I do know that I already did this? Should I:


1. Put it on a wall charger for the remaining 3-7 hrs (since it charged for 13 hrs at 100mA on the Triton)
2. Discharge the pack and then put it on the wall for the whole 16-20 hrs
3. Should I just re-charge it for the whole 16-20 hrs on a wall charger (to me it seems that this would overcarghe it????)

mbba2002

My Feedback: (10)

discharge the battery and start over. NImh batteries sometimes come partially chargerd.The pack should be charged several time befor you see a good result. Why did you buy a 1200 nimh when you can have a 2500 nimh for the same price?

R.C. Spender

I would have reconnected it to any 100ma or so charger for another 5 or 6 hours to finish topping off and balancing the pack. Otherwise wouldn't the pack be uneven when the cells get down to their cutoff voltage when cycling?

Rodney

I think your Triton was working fine, the battery was probably partially charged when you started the cycle and when it hit the point where the peak detector kicked in, it stopped the charge. The fact that this is a peak detector charger has no bearing on what you did as it certainly did not hurt the battery any as you were at the 0.1C rate where a long overcharge would not adversly effect the battery. To get full capacity out of your new battery (or one that has been sitting unused for a month or two) you may have to do as many as three cycles of the slow charge at 0.1C followed by a discharge of 0.25C to about 1 volt per cell. I suspect that the person who told you not to charge the first charge on a peak detecting charger either only told you part of the story or is missinformed himself. He was right on limiting the charge rate to 0.1C for the first few chargers but not on the other as it makes no difference to the battery whether this slow charge is a wall wart or peak detecting charger.

marked23

I plug my nimh packs in to the wall charger for the first charge. Then I discharge them with the Triton. After a few cycles, the batteries are conditioned properly and the Triton will have no problem with them.

If you need to, you can use the Triton for this first charge, but you have to keep restarting the charge cycle. It's kind of a pain. Once it's working however, no problems.

-Mark

strulag

My Feedback: (-1)

I'm all new to this but this is what I read on Radicalrc ( http://members.aol.com/davthacker/ni...0New%20Battery ) "The voltage curve is measured and calculated by these chargers in order to predict the peak. The voltage curve is not normal on a brand new pack. It needs one slow conditioning charge before the curve becomes stable. Try as you may, you can't fill up a new battery on one of these chargers"

Plus the fact that it says on the batterie itself to charger at that rate fro 16-20 hrs? I don't know...I'm just trying to do it right the first time.