Battery Charger Capacity Question

I bought a Lenmar Pro32A charger and a 20 pack of 2500 capacity AA
batteries.

The charger says to use with batteries with up to 2300. If I put in
higher-capacity batteries, will it fully charge them but take longer,
or charge them to less than full capacity, or will something else
happen?

They will explode.

This is why you should leave comedy to the professionals.

They will charge fine, but just take a bit longer

Shaun Eli wrote:
I bought a Lenmar Pro32A charger and a 20 pack of 2500 capacity AA
batteries.

The charger says to use with batteries with up to 2300. If I put in
higher-capacity batteries, will it fully charge them but take longer,
or charge them to less than full capacity, or will something else
happen?

This charger will cut-off charging after 240 minutes.
The charge current with 4 AA cells is 700mA. So after three hours, a
fully-discharged battery would be up to 2100mAH.

So no, the charger will not charge them to full capacity if they were
fully discharged (which is unlikely). Worst case, you'd have to remove
and replace them, or unplug then plug in the charger, to reset the timer
for another 240 minutes.

This is a rather common problem with older chargers, they didn't account
for high capacity batteries that would need more than three hours to
fully charge. But since most people don't fully discharge their
batteries prior to charging, it's not an issue that you have to worry
about that much.

Personally, I'd return this charger, as it's not a good charger.

I bought the 2500's also . They will not charge . I'm returning them
to Buycom .



The resistance is far too high to take a charge .
I started at .6 amp but they soon warmed too much ,
i reduced til finnaly at .2 amp they still overheated .
I use volts as an approx' of charge state so i can quickly
toss them in the "recharge" bin , ready for the next time .
These lenmars won't hold a charge for 24 hours !

The volts drop to 1.34 !!
1.38 is a very good nimh battery , 1.365 will work well .

I bought a VideoCam JVC 30GigaByte HDD and a Minolta Z-6 .
The Z-6 must not use LCD or you will replace rechargeables
every 15 minutes ! And FORGET non-chargeables ! They have so much
resistance , you'll get half the 3 amp hour they claim !
The batt' must be able to source ( as a test ) at least 1 amp to
work in the Z-6 .

The Lith-ion in my "77" JVC is much lower ohms than nimh so
it works well and i can get the full life before recharge .

It you discharge a cell faster than recommended , it's life is
shortened .
The gel'd sulphuric acid cells used everywhere today for PC UPS
and emergency lighting draw far more current , thus reduce the
life ... Its for the gel , it simply can't react chemically fast enuf
..
An aircraft starting Nicad ( wet cell ) has some of the lowest ohms
of any battery made and it's lighter than a car battery .

hopefully someday Lith-ion's will come down in price ....








BTW anyone know where i can

download street maps of bigger US cities .

i'm trip planning and my s/w here is Linux /conquerer ( borrowed from
frnd)
and it crashes and stops responding , so i can't do Yahoo,mapquest, et
al )

Longer ? Good batteries charge in short time , bad batt's take longer
and most important will not have the capacity , but are sold anyway
with your "fine" excuse ...

The old NiCad "mem" fable was actually charging at a rate so low
the plate material had a much diff' ohms path , thus reducing
the electrons in the higher ohms areas .

Pulse chargers fully charge Nicads COMPLETELY .

But if the nicad is bad , it will heat at much lower currents


Good batt's will have C charge rates like .8 amp .

All good batteries will charge in 3hours and less than 200%
"recharge"

You must not charge by time ,only temp compensated voltage
or the temp itself .
Philips long ago used the falling temp .
Temp rises slowly , then gasses ( steeper rise )
then it falls ! as it gasses ! .

I prefer the rising Temp and
pulse charging . Temp rise is loss of battery material ( this is bad
) .

If you take it out off the charger and it's too hot to hold
comfortably
toss it , it will not hold a charge .

On 29 Apr 2006 06:13:56 -0700, Shaun Eli wrote:

I bought a Lenmar Pro32A charger and a 20 pack of 2500 capacity AA
batteries.

The charger says to use with batteries with up to 2300. If I put in
higher-capacity batteries, will it fully charge them but take longer,
or charge them to less than full capacity, or will something else
happen?

No way to know for sure without the manufacturer's literature, but
a guess would be that the charger has a timer that either shut off
the charger or switches to a trickle charge after the amount of time
it would take to charge completely discharged 2300mAh batteries that
are in good condition. If that's the case, then all batteries
(2300, 2500, 2700 and larger) should appear to take the same amount
of time to charge, when in fact the higher capacity batteries
haven't been fully charged. Another indicator that the charger has
cut off early might be if the charger has an LED or LCD display for
each cell, and they all finish charging at the same time, since even
closely matched cells won't all finish charging at exactly the same
time. One way to deal with this would be to stop the charge cycle
well before the NiMH cells have been fully charged and then restart
the charger. This shouldn't be done unless the cells are almost
fully discharged to begin with, as resuming charging when any of the
cells might have previously finished charging could shorten their
lives.

I emailed the company and they wrote back the next business day,
explaining that the charger is limited to charging 2300 (AA) and 850
(AAA), but that another eight hours of trickle-charging would bring the
batteries up to full capacity. He also mentioned that I could charge
them twice, but after the first charge that wouldn't be necessary
because it's unlikely that I'd be trying to charge a fully-depleted
battery anyway.

We exchanged several emails as I had more questions, and I'm very happy
with the customer service response I've gotten from the company that
makes a ten dollar charger.

Shaun Eli
www.BrainChampagne.com
Brain Champagne: Clever Comedy for Smart Minds (sm)
Brain Champagne-- now with a comedy video on the website (six minutes;
clean-- no profanity, no adult topics)