Another Battery Question

Can you charge a nimh battery on a nicad charger setting? My charger does both types. But my batery is taking way to long to charge on nimh, I know my battery is an nimh type 10 cell 2600mah, i put a meter in the line to see what the voltage is and it readsonly 11.63v. I think it should be more around 12v. Give me all the response you've got people cause I'm stumped on this one.

[Bejay]

Stinky, this might be a silly question but is your charger run from a 12volt battery ??? If so, is it capable of doing 10 cells. The NiMh battery of 2600 Mah should be charged at a maximum of 2.6 Amps, which will take an hour to charge from flat. The maximum "on charge" voltage should be somewhere in the region of 14.5 volts when just fully charged.This of course will drop rapidly once charging is complete, to about 13 volts.

Buzz

Yes it's running on a 12v car battery. The charger says its good up to 16 cell batterys, but now I'm hearing that the source voltage is limiting the charge on my battery. Why is it when you buy something people never say "this wont work with that". Damit I'm pissed off now.

[Malcolm]

Get yourself a regulated power supply from Maplin. They do a range of units that all have 13.8 volt and up to 7 amps from as low as £40. There are other PSUs such as those used by Ham radio guys. I think Tim (TAW) has one rated to 20 amp !)

[Bejay]

Stinky.....slow down.......I'm not saying this won't work with that....nobody is, I'm just trying to get the facts together to be in a position to try and help. If the charger is designed to do up to 16 cells and designed to do this running off a 12 volt battery, if both are in good condition then I'm sure they will work. All we have to do is find out why they're not. First, the 12v battery has to be good (and charged), the connections have to be good and ideally the battery should be flat. If set to NiMh it should charge at about 2.5 Amps and take an hour to charge.

So....question.....out of this list what can you tell us about what is happening versus what should be.

Buzz

OK. I went out and put another meter on the car battery. I'm reading around 13v. Now my meter on the battery is reading around 15v. It has gone up a bit. But the charger says its not done yet. I also looked at the data sheet for the charger and in a small print it says that the max current out for nimh is around 1.5a, not ma.It says this should charge batteries 1650ma and larger. No trickle charge is available for nimh. The charger thinks it can charge a 2600mah battery what do you think?

[BertVK]

So how long does it take to charge your NiMh cells?
Give us all the numbers you got.

[Bejay]

Stinky, if it will only give a maximum 1.5A charge, then it will take about 1 and 3/4 hours to charge 2600's from flat.

Buzz

It will only take me a second to throw them out the window. I'll get some more info when the charger is done be back soon.

Battery is still dead. 0 current. 11.5vvery faint. Was on the charger for over 2 hours and still nothing. The baterry was charging outside on my car. It is around 40 degrees outside. Supose the battery is so cold it can't take a charge. Can that happen?