In theory, a 150 mAh charger, of the right voltage and polarity, should work on a 650,900, 1100, etc. It will just take a LONG time to charge.
And leaving any battery charging unattended is generally not advisable. Many do it, with no problems. But all it takes is once.
Actually, I have empirical evidence. Still have my Joye 510 charger (150mA) and when I went to bed last night, the Twist (1000mAh) on the eGo charger wasn't done so I stuck the other battery on the 510 charger. Both were green and ready to go this morning. And I do this all the time.
But... I was half raised by a master electrician (my grandpa), have worked as an electrician's assistant, DIY home wiring all the time (just did some over at my brother's house last week), and actually know what 150mA "means". Not likely the most expert person around ECF, I'm sure there are any number of people
far above my level but if I'm in doubt, I got meters and can check the polarity and voltage of stuff. Also know why that's important.
Folks who neither want to take nor have the time to go take classes on this kind of thing just to use their PVs, it's better to just stick to the branded stuff from reputable vendors and realize any and all Li-ion batteries are
capable of causing a fire though it is
exceedingly rare.
In fact, given the number of batteries in use and the infinitesimal number of reports of problems, worrying too much about your PV batteries is more distraction than anything. Such as in the US (alone) there are over 300 million active cell phones (just cell phones.... and, no, I don't know how it works that there are more active cell phones than people here) and the last serious article I read about "concerns" cited the "dozens of incidents since 2011".
Think about that. Cell phones use
exactly the same batteries. The form factor is different but the consumer PV/e-cig is built of commodity parts like the consumer cell phone (laptop, iPad, tablet, Kindle... etc. ad nauseum). "Dozens of incidents" in two years out of hundreds of millions of batteries?
And though I've looked and paid attention, I can't find any "incident" that resulted in actual death. Unlike that thing we call "smoking".
Which makes this concern over the batteries a bit funny in a dark humor sort of way. How many house fires were/are caused by cigarettes? Without even looking, I can say it's "a hell of a lot more". The chances of you setting your house on fire with your cigarettes was far,
far,
far greater than the chance your PV battery is going to overheat and cause a fire.
On top of that is the modern reality that everybody reading this post is surrounded by wires carrying 120v AC on 15 to 20 amp circuits
in their walls. What condition are all those wires in? Have you checked?
Remember, you'd have to tear out all the drywall to take a look.
(Okay, not everybody reading this. But those of you not on the 120 standard are on one about twice ours. That ain't 12v coming out of EU outlets.
)
So whaddaya gonna do? Shut the power off at the main when you leave the house? 'Course, then, you could run into the problem we had here in 2011. High winds brought down a power line within two miles of my house and had the winds been shifted slightly, this place wouldn't be here. The fire tore through our little semi-suburb and took out a good 1600 houses before it was contained.
In general, just be reasonable. Such as, no battery likes a lot of heat. Those "cigarette lighter" USB adapters? Great for charging "on the go". Just don't leave your batteries charging in the car while you're not there. Sitting in the hot sun. Getting hotter by the moment. You might not have a car left when you get back. But that's been true all the way back to plain old, cheap double A and D cells and what not. Leave those in a closed up vehicle in a Texas summer and you're risking a fire. At least a really nasty mess.
I charge overnight. Then again, I have good smoke alarms I test regularly. Also, there's a home fire extinguisher on that wall right over there. They're just not that expensive. Go get one.
Unplugging your PV batteries at night won't stop the outlet the TV's plugged into going whacky and shorting and starting to burn. Ya might wanna know where the breaker box is so you can cut the power after the regularly tested smoke detector goes off and you're grabbing the home fire extinguisher you check regularly to be sure it's fully charged.
You know, having gone through Katrina then, cripes, the big wildfire here (and I moved here to get away from those "coast line" things) which ripped right by me, I've got some residual PTSD running around. Which anxiety disorder latched onto the tendency of central Texas to have wildfires and
then was exacerbated by an actual, historic scale (no, really, "most destructive in state history" they said) wildfire. Oh. Yipee.
And I still charge my batteries at night while I'm asleep and sleep pretty damn good too. But, like I said, I have good smoke detectors, test regularly, and have a home fire extinguisher. I find knowing I have ways to deal with small fires and head them off is way, way better than fretting over my PV batteries.
By the way, DavidOck, this isn't "aimed at" you or anybody, I just used your post to jump into one my long winded keyboard rattling sessions. It is, just in general, beginning to bother me that some seem to be worrying more about the extremely rare catastrophic failure of PV batteries and forgetting that the
smoking is/was a threat to their health and safety by huge honking orders of magnitude.
And that's got to be the ultimate irony in these periodic battery fretting sessions. I still have not found one incident of death caused by a Li-ion battery going bad. Maybe there is one out there I haven't found yet? Smoking is estimated to kill around 400,000 per year in the US. Which works out to about 45 people per hour. Or roughly one every 80 seconds. More people have died from smoking related illness in the time I took to write this post than have been so much as injured by consumer Li-ion batteries world wide in the last two years (or more... maybe ever... as in since the batteries began being used in consumer products in the 90s).
