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Originally Posted by Mike Betts
A couple of references have been made to the "memory effect" of Ni-Cad batteries. I did a lot of research into this in the late 80's and can state that it simply does not exist.
Now before someone ups and quotes a university, technical or other "knowledgeable" source, I would ask you to read the sidebar article, Memory effect? No, voltage depression, in this article from EDN magazine. It does as good of a job of explaining the phenomenon in (almost) layman's terms.
The "memory effect" has been bantered about for so long (over 40 years) that it is accepted as fact by many very smart scientists and engineers. I had a devil of a time trying to explain this to my to management... But that's another story...
Regards,
Mike |
Yes, Mike. It is more appropriately called voltage depression, but it is widely known as memory effect and the early quit of the equipment that sees the voltage drop is what matters. Putting those sleepy NiCds through a couple of cycles of a charger that conditions them through a proper discharge, watching the voltage, will usually get good performance out of a battery. Using such a charger, as opposed to a trickle charger, is a good idea to avoid these problems.
The notion that NiMh batteries dont suffer from these problems is also incorrect, on top of all of this. Their problems are not as severe, but NiMh also can get a bit sleepy after storage and a couple of cycles from a good conditioning charger will wake them up.
The Maha MH-C777PLUS charger, or its equivalent, will allow you to keep on top of this, and will tell you what your battery capacity is.
Please recycle batteries properly when they die...
At our first regional with a back up battery, I think two years ago, the tech inspector did not allow a larger radio shack battery and insisted on the IFI backup battery, in spite of the written rules. We compiled...