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Easy battery question....please


ECohen

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  • 3 weeks later...

Don't leave lithium batteries fully discharged for a long period or they may drop below the critical voltage, at which point they will no longer accept a charge. I have a lithium battery USB power bank, where that happened. Luckily the makers agreed that 6 months without charging was too short a period for it to die and replaced it. I now charge it every three months or so.

 

We have a number of lithium battery torches and bike lights. They were mostly inexpensive ones and usually came with blue Ultrafire 18650 over-discharge unprotected batteries. Quite a few of these will no longer accept a charge and have gone to the recycling. I now only buy Panasonic or Nitecore protected batteries, which fully cut off when they fall to the floor voltage. The stated capacity on Ultrafire batteries is frequently totally fictitious. Many of them are just re-cased cells stripped from scrapped laptop batteries, made by Chinese home workers. There are also loads of fakes around of the "good" Panasonic and Nitecore batteries on Fleabay and even Amazon. Buy only from a reputable seller. I buy all mine from Ecolux in the UK and have never had a problem with batteries bought from them. 

 

Sadly you cannot use some rechargeable lithium cells such as RCR123A/16340 in place of the non-rechargeable CR123A lithium batteries used in some Leica flashes (e.g. SF-24D). The fully charged voltage of around 4.2V per cell is too high and trips a safety circuit preventing the flash from switching on (I know I tried and another member threw his SF24 flash away, thinking it was broken). Hopefully at some point, some company might make a voltage regulated version of these rechargeables. 

 

Wilson

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