battery-life, battery, chargingI have so many devices with rechargeable batteries that slowly die over time and was wondering if there any device that could recondition the batteries to get some life back out of them?
I know there is a difference from the old nickel cadmium days where you could try and get some life back by charging them in a particular fashion. And that we now have Lithium Ion devices and other technologies in play.
But boy would it be nice to breathe some life back into those dead batteries. (Laptop, Blackberry, cordless phones, cell phones, etc).
It depends entirely on the chemistry of the battery. For example:
Lead-acid batteries (think: car starter or electric scooter) can be "de-sulfated" thru a special charge/discharge cycle which typically restores much of the battery's original capacity.
Ni-cd batteries can lose some of their capacity if they aren't fully discharged every once in a while. Performing a deep discharge can potentially restore capacity.
Ni-MH and Li-ion batteries don't really exhibit the drastic/sudden capacity loss like Ni-cds and lead-acids, but (like all batteries) will slowly lose capacity over time as the electrolyte wears out thru repeated use. Ergo, no real "conditioning" can be performed.
In fact, Li-ion batteries start losing capacity as soon as they roll off the assembly line and will continue to lose capacity slowly over time, whether they are being used or not. To counter-act this effect, it is recommended that a Li-ion battery be kept cool and if being stored for a long time, kept at a 40% charge.
The only advantage of fully discharging a Li-ion battery could be to recalibrate a smart charger (like on your laptop) -- by fully discharging the battery, it gives the charge controller an opportunity to monitor how much power was used to recharge the battery and thus calculate the current max. capacity of the battery. This gives a better estimate of runtime, but doesn't improve the capacity any...
More info about batteries can be read about at: http://www.batteryuniversity.com
So to answer your question:
yes, Lead-acids and NiCds can be reconditioned to an extent, but eventually they will wear out completely and no amount of reconditioning will fix them.
no, NiMHs and Li-ions typically cannot be reconditioned. Once they're worn out, they're dead.
Please recycle! :)
Yes, they do exist. At least for some battery types.
The described effects can be caused by overcharging by cheap tricle-chargers and be reversed by a deep charge/discharge cycle.
The more advanced chargers can do one or more deep charge/discharge cycles. For instance, I use a Conrad Charge Manager 2000 for AAA and AA batteries. It has a "Q-CYCLE" mode and a "Q-ALIVE" mode. The former does a charge-decharge-charge cycle. The latter does several of these (number depends on the result of the charging) to recover old batteries that may have been left uncharged for too long.
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