Scott Murray
Senior Member
I bought a set of these batteries thinking that they would be great, unfortunately they do not hold their charge and I will be throwing them out.
Never buy these batteries
- Thread starter Scott Murray
- Start date
ScottinPollock
Banned
I have had extremely good results with Sanyo Eneloop rechargeables. They last for years.
Scott Murray
Senior Member
Yes I have many of those aswell and would recommend them to everyone.
rocketman122
Senior Member
sounds weird. powerex has been around for years. they were the best in the field and always ranked top on charts I saw. their chargers are excellent as well. maha power/powerex-same same.
Scott Murray
Senior Member
Well I have trashed 8 of these batteries as they would not last or hold charge.
rocketman122
Senior Member
how long did you have them? they sound like counterfeit. personally I would have sent them to maha and told them their batts suck azz and see what they say. powerex was THE batts to get just a few years back. I used energizers for years. recently buying 24 eneloops. very quick but ill let you know after a year of use. HEAVY use. I work my batteries like a MF. 6x4 for flashes. 6x4 spares and theyre in my 8x622n slaves.
Last edited:
Scott Murray
Senior Member
I have had them for around 8 months, got them at the same time I got my Sanyo Eneloops and MAha charger.
Scott Murray
Senior Member
Just checked purchase date and I got them April 2014 they came with the charger.
I like Eneloop, but Maha is a great brand, and their Imedion are supposed to be good, and are well regarded. I wondered if these were purchased from a major reputable source, or just on the internet somewhere? It is said that the possibility of getting fake stuff is always present, for any brand.
Scott Murray
Senior Member
Well the charger I got is working great but these just died. Maybe they were dodgy ones but I am still not impressed and the fact that all 8 loose charge roughly at the same rate is very strange.
rocketman122
Senior Member
yes, exactly. the energizers I buy are said to have 1000 charges. its BS. it will hold in high heavy use for about 1.5 years no more. im getting to the point im doing a slow replacement to all of them.
shame you threw them. you should have szent them back to them. you dont know the power of social media Scott? they would want to keep you happy and would probably send you back a new set and an apology. shame. powerex/maha (777 universal charger) are great companies.
Bob Blaylock
Senior Member
I'm wondering if you are basing your experience with these on a comparable experience with other NiMH batteries, or with disposable Alkaline or carbon-zinc batteries.
A very long time ago, at a time when I was using a lot of disposable AA and AAA batteries for various applications, I bought a set of Energizer-brand rechargeable NiMH batteries, and a charger. I found them to be very unsatisfactory. I don't know what the capacity is of the disposable battery types, compared to the claimed 2500 mAH capacity of these NiMH batteries, but it apparently is much greater. No device would run for nearly as long on a set of NiMH batteries as it would on disposables. Further, because NiMH has a nominal voltage of about 1.2 volts per cell, compared to 1.5 volts for alkaline or carbon-zinc, a device meant to run on disposables would, even with a set of fresh, fully-charged NiMH batteries, run as if the batteries were weak.
I also found that the NiMH batteries have a fairly high self-discharge rate. Put them into a drawer, just after you have fully charged them, and come back later when you need them, and you'll likely find that they've discharged enough that you can't use them until you charge them again.
It didn't take long for me to give up on these batteries, and go back to using disposables. My conclusion is that devices that are made to run on disposable batteries just cannot be expected to perform well on rechargeable—at least not within the parameters of standard types of these batteries. If you could get five NiMH cells to fit in a device made to take four disposables in series (so that you get the same total voltage), and if that device was a relatively low-power device, then you might get acceptable performance.
Anyway, those NiMH batteries sat forgotten in a drawer for well over a decade, until very recently,when I got it into my head to use eight of them to build a new battery pack for my radio-controlled model tank. In the course of having got it into my head to dig that out and refurbish it, I found that although it was nominally supposed to be 9.6 volts, the battery pack that came with it, when fully charged, only put out about 8 volts; apparently, there's at least one bad cell in it. So, a new pack, built out of these old NiMH cells that had been sitting unused and forgotten for so long, before I even charged it, showed an open-circuit voltage of over ten volts. I was surprised to find that they open circuit voltage was above nominal, even though it had been more than a decade since they were last charged, but not at all surprised that they had no power to deliver.
Of course, once I charged them properly, they performed, fine, and in fact, the tank performs better with this new pack than I think it ever did with the old one. Perhaps the old pack was defective from the beginning. Though the tank ran on that pack, I don't think I ever before thought to check the voltage on it, and, as I said, the tank performs better now with the new one.
The yellow battery pack is the original. The one in red/white/blue is the new one.
Scott, that 1.5V business is actually not quite the true picture. Look at this graph:
Technologies | eneloop | Panasonic Batteries Site
Also look at the second graph down the page, for zero degrees centigrade.
Which voltage seems higher?
This is Panasonic because they bought Sanyo, including Eneloop.
Alkalines may start at 1.5 or 1.6V, but they quickly drop to below the NiMH voltage. Because while NiMH (and most rechargeables) start lower, basically they hold there at a constant voltage for their life. During most of the life of both types, NiMH is HIGHER voltage than alkaline. There is more energy in the NiMH. Most simple electronic gear (like a mp3 player or TV remote control) quit at about 1.1 V. Which is nothing for NiMH to stay above that, but harder for alkaline. Alkaline recycles slower in our flashes too.
That is a stylized graph, at only 500 ma current drain. Speedlights might pull 6000 ma during recycle (for a couple of seconds), so that curve is similar, but not quite as pretty, but that current is really really hard on alkalines.
You have seen this same action in the battery charge status of little devices like a pocket mp3 player. NiMH starts out at only about 2/3 on the little meter, which is designed to show alkaline voltage drop. But NiMH will hold there for the life of the battery, until it suddenly quits.
Meanwhile, alkalines are sinking lower and lower, 1/2 and 1/3 and 1/4, until they quit. The battery status is simply a volt meter.
Probably the reason for a flash having no status meter, it would never show any change, but some users do use alkaline batteries. The recycle speed is still an indicator though, it gets slower and slower for alkaline, but holds in there for NiMH.
You can look at the data sheet curves for any NiMH or any alkaline, and see the same thing. But, higher current is a real big deal making the curves steeper. Where the NiMH may not look as pretty, the alkaline curve looks outright terrible, a straight line down.
Here are the Eneloop data sheets:
Data-Sheets - Panasonic
Here is a Energizer alkaline e91 data sheet
http://data.energizer.com/PDFs/E91.pdf
Yes, NiMH does, as did NiCd. Many NiCd are on a charger all the time. But the point of the Eneloop type (developed by Sanyo, licensed to many now) is that THEY don't self discharge in the same way. They do have a little smaller capacity than regular NiMH, maybe 25% less. So if you have a large photo shoot tomorrow involving hundreds of shots, maybe use regular NiMH for their larger capacity, but be sure to recharge them tonight.
But for most of us, taking maybe only a few flash pictures every week, or maybe snapshots on Easter and Christmas, Eneloops are a miraculous wonder.
Last edited:
I've used PowerEx batteries and their Maha C9000 charger for aproximately 8 years. They've been great performers without a doubt. I've slowly built up my stock of Eneloop and let my PowerEx die out. Both brands work great IMO but Eneloops seem to hold a stronger charge longer than your average bear. Sucks about your batteries. From my experience and others I've seen, PowerEx is a great product.
We have some Energizer rechargeables laying around, though they're probably all bad by now due to age. The biggest issue we found with them is that they have a short "shelf life" - that is, you can't charge them and expect to have them still ready to go a few weeks later, so you need to be ready to recharge them before use. We've started buying Duracells from the local shopper's club in bulk (Duracell because that's what they sell - if it were Energizer we'd be buying those instead).