Conditioning batterys
 

My wife works at the little Post Office in our town. They have a program that you download and then use the USB cable to patch to their battery powered gadgets. It conditions the batteries and makes them last a lot longer than if just charging and discharging. What a clever idea to use the puter to conditon your batteries. I better not give out the site where this app is located since it may be the property of the post office. Think of the possibilities, you could buy a big power supply for your puter, a 1000 watt one and charge and condition every battery you have at once. The program will accomodate 6 at once.

I'd be very cautious of this. First off, what type of battery? Different chemistry's will have drastically different requirements. Some types can not be recharged or conditioned once formed. Some types can be ruined by improper connections. As I said, be very cautious of such device unless you have access to the complete instruction manual that goes with it.

Rodney, the type of battery's are the ones used in cell phones and scanners. You have to have the batteries at 50% charge or more. You hook up each battery via patch cord to the USB port on the computer. After all is connected you hit 'start' and the computer does the rest. I have no intentions of using this method on my batteries, but what i wondered with all the electronic techo out there, if any of the charger manufacturers have looked at this. All of their batteries have to be "conditioned" at least once a month. Their computers are limited to 4 at a time since the power supply isn't capable of any more, but a larger capacity power supply could make it do 6 at a time.

Sounds like a balance charger for lipos. They are most likely running things that use a 2 cell lithium battery and their chargers don't balance charge. I plug my phone and ipod into the computer all the time to charge them.

I charge my cell phone from the USB ports too, but there's no "conditioning" cycle, just the plain old 12 volts that all cell's and scanners use.

Phone batteries have a circuit board integrated into them to manage charging the lithium batteries. It monitors the voltage and shuts off the charge when it's complete. I can't imagine what computer program would be required to do that, since every cell phone on the market already has that as part of its design. A USB port can't do discharging or alter its voltage. It works off of the 5v power lead from the power supply.

There is a program out there, ask any post office employee, they'll tell you.

I'm not doubting you, kamakazi. I'm just stating the facts that battery management is built into the pack itself. I'm genuinely curious what this program does that our phones don't already do for themselves.

Conditioning batteries is basically a slow and gentle charge, and really a slow and gentle discharge. Phone and computer batteries don't have to pull serious current so the discharge part of the equation is often ignored. There is plenty of data out there to support all this, most of it geared toward smaller computer/phone batteries but the technology is the same.

Lithium ions are very reactive. They are so reactive they will react with the case or environment they are in if they don't have 'line of sight' to their destination. Forming charges for lithium batteries are slow to make sure that the lithium ions can arrange themselves properly - which is by voltage or energy. This allows the higher charged particles to get where they need to go rather than being blocked behind slower moving charges, in which case the highly charged particle may react with its environment (puffed packs are often a result of the ion reacting with the environment and releasing a gas). Again the information is all out there if you G search lithium battery forming charges or something similar.