What kind of battery Life are you guys getting/ or should expect from your battery packs? I have a better back that I purchased in August of 2007. Its a 2300mah 5 cell pack. In preparation for this coming season, I was trying to cycle the pack but am only getting about 1000-1400 mah into it. Is about 2 years a normal life span in order to replace?

Im not knocking the vendor should I have a bad pack, but I ordered it from allbattery.com. Could you guys list where you buy from so I can take a look around. Thanks!

It's really hard to place a time frame on battery life like weeks, months, or years. There are so many factors that go into determining the life of a battery it's hard to boil it down to how old the pack is. Some of the things that can determine the life of a battery are how many times it's been recharged, how it's been recharged (quick charge or slow charge), how the battery has been discharged, the temperature in the operating environment, vibration in operation, and many more factors go into determining how long the battery will last. The best way to determine if the pack is ready to be replaced is by its capacity. When you first get the battery cycle it to determine it's initial capacity (I usually to a 3 cycle set to get the capacity). Then throughout the life of the battery you should regularly cycle the battery (once a month or so) and compare the capacity to the initial capacity. When it drops down to 80% of the initial capacity I will replace that pack.

In your case, having to replace the pack after 2 years use is a completely reasonable time frame.

Ken

Thanks Ken!

keep cycleing it
i had a bunch of 2/3 a cells that i never used from all battery.com so i made a pack out of em
they are rated for 1300, when i started cycling they were at 500. about 10 cycles later now they are at 1301.
so cycle it a little and see how it holds out.
if it slowly increases keep going at it.
i found charging and discharging at .4 ma works well

I had the same issue with some new packs that I just bought I went to charge them for the first time and only got around 1200 they were supposed to be 2700mAh packs!!! I use the triton 2(blah) I found that setting my peak sensitivity to 8mv instead of the 5 default cured the problem. The second attempt at a cycle got me 2806 into the pack I charged them at 100mA the smallest the triton will do. It took around 15 hours to get a full charge.

Yup, this is where a good computer controller charger pays for itself.

Cycling the packs, while tracking their capacity, temp, etc. goes a long way towards both keeping them operating at peak efficiency and also giving you the knowledge that they will work as you expect.

I use the [link=http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXPYT8&P=ML]Team Checkpoint[/link] charger for this purpose. One of the best investments I've made.

I use it to check out all of my flight packs, TX batteries, and even packs for non-rc devices.

RC Ken summed it up quite well. How well you care for the batteries makes a big difference as well as temperatures. NiCads will typically outlast NiMh two to one if both are properly cared for. High temperature operation will definitely lower the lifetime for either chemistry a great deal. I have had NiCads work well for well over 10 years before they lost 10% of their original capacity. I've also had some fail after just a few cycles of use. The biggest foe of long life is fast charging without proper safety program (overcharging of one or more cells), high temperatures and deep discharge where one or more cells become reverse charged. If NiCads and NiMhs are properly formed and cared for, you can expect at least 500 charge/discharge cycles on the NiMh and 1000 on the NiCad.

I had a pack from that vendor fail within 3 months. Try putting the battery on a loaded meter and see what happens.

What should be the best rate to cycle a 1,100 maH 4.8 volts rx battery?
Discharge rate ?
Charge rate?