Sovereign rechargable battery...

[matthias]

Does it have 'memory'? I seem to only get about 4 good hours out of it. Its not that old. I do charge it a lot. Thanks. HH. Matt

 

[fredo]

same as me.....

 

[Buried Crap NJ]

I hunted Sunday for 7.5 hrs and today with it for 3 hrs will use it Sunday again till it dies on the beach. I always have an extra one with me when I get towards the end. Batteries are affected by heat. This battery is 2yrs old gets charged about 2 times a week.The wall wart and thremosistor use by Minelab is the cheapest way to charge. When the battery gets hot it shuts off the current flow. This type of charging ruins batteries! NiMH batteries batteries don't retain a memory. Math goes a long way. If the battery is 800mah and the charger puts out 50ma then a dead battery needs 16hrs 16 x 50 = 800 If you run for 4 hrs and keep over charging your just producing heat. I would turn it on and drain it and start over.

 

[matthias]

Thanks man. HH. Matt

 

[Critterhunter]

Fully excercising the battery will help. Hitch it up to a car tail light bulb and let it drain until it goes out. When it does go out let it sit hooked up to it for another hour or so to make sure any cells out of balance have also fully discharged. Put it back on the charger. I think the wall transformer says either 50 or 100ma. The pack is 1000ma, so If it's 50ma output from the transformer then figure on 20 hours for a full charge, but let it sit another 3 or 4 hours charging because charging is inefficient and often takes longer than the math tells you.

The reason for draining the pack dead like this is, besides fully excercising it to increase it's capacity (run time), is that over time cells get out of balance and as a result you can have several cells holding a pretty good charge while others are near dead. Throw them on the charger and the ones holding a higher charge can spike the m/v threshold trigger of the charger and it will stop charging, even though several cells are still well below being fully charged, but the others that hit full charge spiked the threshold trigger (a drop in voltage based on the m/v setting of a charger determines how big of a drop this voltage must be to trigger end of charge). It's normal for a pack to dip a bit in voltage as the pack is being charged due to the chemistry going on, so the m/v threshold has to be high enough to ignore these momentary drops in voltage while still recognizing a larger drop which indicates the pack really has reached full charge.