Okay so I'm trying to make a 6V pack using tabbed 10AH D cell batteries. All tabbes are soldered and are showing little to no resistance on my meter. All batteries are connected negative to positive and what not. The problem is that when I plug the pack up to my Super Brain 977 it registers error and even the little smart charger that came with the batteries doesn't see them. Both of the chargers have no problems linking up to my two earlier packs. Here are a few pics: I've been having problems from day 1 with batteries and I am at wits end. Does anyone have any suggestions / things to try / thoughts of wisdom anything?
Well, here is my general "Pack troubleshooting" list... 1. What is the voltage at the connector? Is it greater than or equal to the number of cells times the minimum cell voltage? If the answer is NO, you have a bad connection somewhere or a bad cell or have overdischarged the packs... many chargers have trouble with over discharged packs, and you have to get the voltage up near the normal min/max range before they will connect and charge. For a bad cell, check voltage across each cell. actually, that is generally a good idea anyways, as all the cells should be at about the same voltage. If one cell is really low compared to the others, it probably has died. A note that improper (or unlucky) soldering has killed many a cell over the years.
My fist thought on looking at the pics was... 'CRIMPED CONNECTORS!!! ON THE BATTERIES!?!?!!?!! PRIVATE PYLE, YOU ARE IN A WORLD OF SH**!' (Crimped connectors in the middle of a flexible wire run, in an application that calls for repeated handling (taking batteries in and out) is asking for trouble. You're a nice guy and I don't want that to happen to you. Strongly recommend soldering all connections where you aren't using Dean's or Powerpole connectors. I have both types in various boats and they work equally well. Dean's are more compact, Powerpoles are cheaper. Either one is 100% good to go. After the moment passed, I thought along the lines of what Greg said. Check the voltage with a multimeter at the plug of the battery. Also, just to be sure (Having been an electrician in the Navy, I know that if anything on my boats is going be wrong, it'll be electrical. God has a sense of humor.) double check that the red wire is in fact attached to the positive termal and the black likewise is on the negative. If that's backwards, everything will look good but the battery chargers will show an error. Edited to add mininovel on why crimped connectors are suboptimal
Yea I agree with the crimp connectors...That was simply a function of me thinking I might have possible made a bad connection with the end wires. So I had my dad look at the pack with his meter and he is pretty sure that it is probably just that the (Bran Spank'in New) batteries have no charge in them as all the connections check out. So I've got to try and find a "stupid" charger to see if I can put enough of a charge on them to be seen by my smart chargers....Sigh...Thanks for getting back so quickly on this...I was almost ready to just shelve the entire boat for a while...
You might try a couple things with your charger. You can bumping up charge voltage by 1 to 1.5 volts (or one more cell count) to get it charging. Those 10Ah D cells are somewhat notorious for being a bit difficult to charge with some chargers. My semi-smart charger won't do it. My pretty smart yet simple charger handles them ok. Don't forget to cycle the pack 5 times or so to "break" them in. The battery chemistry has to settle with a few charges. Once it does that, capacity and amp draw will reach the advertised levels.
Although, I would say that I have never had a good cell come in the mail new with no charge, nor have I ever had a cell work properly EVER again after discharging to almost zero or zero volts. I have done it a few times, but while the packs would sometimes retain their capacity for a few hours, they no longer held even half a full charge for more than a day. Those packs were always relegated to engine starter duty as they could be kept topped off enough to start an engine reliably, but I never ran them again in ship or plane.
You should discharge and charge in order to cycle but not to zero. I forget the setting for NIMH but its listed in my charger manual but its not that low.
So get this, I was checking all the other batteries that I bought at the same time as the ones I used in the pack for this thread and every last one of them is dead as a door nail. 20 batteries shot to (insert appropriate expletive)! My father brought over a stupid charger and managed to get enough juice in the pack to let the Super Brain 977 see it and I'm going to put it through a couple trickle charge cycles. Maybe I can at least get someing out of it.
sigh...the price I pay for learning things...I only bought them a little over a month ago so I'm in the process of trying to find out where I bought them from to maybe work out a deal...who knows.
It was e-bay from All-Battery. I've sent them a message to see if I can get an exchange of at least the 15 I haven't done anything to yet. Who knows maybe they will go for it.
Well it was a no go from All Battery. That was expected. Time to see if I can bring any life to the remaining batteries. Maybe I can get at least half power packs out of them.
Good luck. You may get them up enough to battle with, but you will probably notice that they don't hold a charge as well as they would have.
I picked up a pile of AA sized nimhs from them not too long ago with no problems in the batch. I guess this is one of those 'your mileage may vary' cases.
I've had other orders with them before and everything was good. Apparently this was just a bad batch...I just didn't think to check.
I have had a simular problem. I would test the voltage on the cell and it would read o.o I ended up quick charging them at first so they woould take a charge. I used a Duratrax Pirahnna charger to do the quick charging. I then used a Tenergy 36volt smart charger to charge up the 6 packs that I have. Now the packs are reading good voltage. Something like 6.2 volts ( I forgot) Hope this helps on recovering the cells that you have. I to had bought mine from All-Battery Kim
Well he also has another issue I discussed with him at the Bruhaha, I did the same thing myself when I first purchased Nimh's. He has D cell's, if you check the spec's on the C, and D's they are only rated as 1C batteries, which means dont go over a 10 amp max discharge rate. Most of the SubC's will do 10C, and some as high as 20C. Since I went to the SubC's I have not been having a battery issue with the Nimh's.
