| CHARGING INFORMATION
Battery manufacturers recommend to slow charge a new
NICAD battery for 24 hours before use. This initial trickle charge helps
to redistribute the electrolyte to remedy dry spots on the separator
that may appear when the electrolyte gravitates to the bottom of the
cell during long storage. A slow charge also helps to bring all the
individual cells within a battery pack up to an equal charge level
because each cell may have self-discharged to different capacity levels
during storage.
REFRESH INFORMATION
Commonly recommended way to get the maximum performance from your laptop
battery. Refresh is the process of allowing your computer battery to
drain completely (to do this you will need to disable all power
management utilities). Once drained recharge the battery to 100% this
will refresh all cells within the battery. Doing this every few months
will help extend the life of your portable computer battery
DISCHARGE INFORMATION
The commonly used end-of-discharge voltage for the
NICAD and NiMH is one volt per cell. At that voltage level, most of the
energy is spent and the voltage starts to drop rapidly. Discharging a
battery further could damage the battery through cell reversal. Caution
should be exercised when discharging a battery too deeply under heavy
load.
The end-of-discharge voltage of the Li-ion
needs to be carefully controlled and must, under no circumstances, go
below 2.5V per cell. Protection circuit intrinsic to the Li-ion pack
prevent the battery from being discharged below the safe limit. If
allowed to self-discharge below 2.5V, unrecoverable capacity loss occurs
when stored in that condition for three months or longer. Similar to the
NiMH and SLA, more cycles can be obtained by partially, rather than
fully discharging the Li-ion battery.
The SLA should not be discharged beyond 1.75V per
cell, nor can it be stored in a discharged state. The cells of a
discharged SLA sulfate, a condition that renders the battery useless if
left in that state for a few days.
Older batteries can by discharged by using a deep
discharge debug routine.
|
