[TheForge] Re: Battery technology (was Cordless drills)

[Mike Spencer]

> The NiMH do have the disadvantage of not staying charged up when not
> in use. A NiMH battery can loose as much as 10% charge just sitting
> overnight.

Oy!  Comes the light.  My digital camera is an old Kodak DC40 that
uses conventional AA cells.  So I bought NiMH, used the camera, worked
fine.  Next time I wanted it, the batteries were dead.  I thought it
was something wrong with the camera.

What *great* batteries.  Gak.  Remember those ads for flash light
batteries -- Ray-O-Vac I think? -- where a happy couple gets into some
dark and nasty place, then finds a 10-year-old flashlight with
Ray-O-Vac batteries?  And it works and They Are Saved?

BTW, WRT deep discharge of NiCd batteries: I don't think it's an urban
myth that they need it but it may be an historical artifact.  An
electrical engineer friend worked at a company developing and
marketing the technology in the late 50s or early 60s.  I recall his
mentioning that, at his company, prolonged deep discharge was
necessary to recondition NiCd batteries after some period of use and
customers returned them for that service.  The tech may have found a
way around that by now.

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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