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So on the sad note, the Canada Post delivery notice I received was not the contact lenses I’ve been waiting for (for two weeks) but on a happy note it’s a geeky new toy, in the La Crosse Technology BC-900 battery charger.

First impressions:

This thing looks cheap.. but it has lots of information on display so its forgiveable.. and it comes with batteries and a bag.. and some adapters so you can use AA batteries in your C and D cell equipment (didn’t know you could do that!).

Anyhow, last night I plopped in 4 of my oldest NiMH batteries (rated 2300mAH) and set it to Test mode. It fills up the batteries to full, then drains them, then fills them up again and reports the capacity.

If I had placed these batteries into my old charger.. it would have charged until one battery was full then stopped for all of them or done something like that. Little did I know that the four batteries started at pretty varied voltages. I set it to charge at 500mAH (5hrs to fill 2300mAH) and then discharge at 250mAH (10 hrs to empty). Two of the batteries were filled in about 3 hours.. but the other two took another 2-3 hours. (basically empty). They finished at varying voltages, from 1.46v to 1.51v.. and then they started to discharge at 250mAH.

When I woke this morning.. 3 were done.. and as I was writing down their reported capacities.. the 4th (batt#4, the one which hit the highest voltage during the initial charge) finished. The results I got were pretty surprising.. but fairly in line with what the initial charging peak voltages implied.

Two of the batteries (which finished charging with relatively low voltages last night) only reported 1470mAH and 1480mAH as max capacity! Batt#1 reported 1550mAH and batt#4 topped out at about 1880mAH. Talk about a difference! Anyway.. currently all 4 batteries are going through a discharge/charge cycle at 350mAH/700mAH. I’ll report on the capacities tonight, and then set them to “refresh” mode and see if these batteries are too old to increase their capacity again.

Seeing as we know electronics only function until the weakest battery dies.. that would mean I could have been putting 1470mAH batteries into a flash. yikes. And that would be assuming I could even get them fully charged.