Battery charging question

[Baditude]

Understood. The batteries at my local vape shop sells me just a blue battery that says IRC18650 2600mah 3.7V. Thats all it says, they are $15 a piece. Idk if i should continue to buy from them since idk the brand name or not.

Generic, no name-brand batteries are unknown batteries made by an unknown manufacturer of unknown quality. For all you know they are the rejects that the name brand manufacturers were not willing to sell under their name. Or they are batteries harvested from old laptop computers, rewrapped and sold as new batteries. Is this what you want to put into your mod?

ICR (Li-ion) batteries are obsolete for use in mods. They are a volatile chemistry (they vent fire and can explode when they fail). You should use ONLY IMR (Li-Mn) safe chemistry batteries.

 

[wrice4]

So, I will be good with this, for my VTR:
NITECORE Intellicharger i2
Panasonic Hybrid/IMR CGR18650CH Flat Top (2)

 

[wrice4]

Just ordered those, I think they will be fine.

 

[imsoenthused]

Yep, the charger is great and assuming you get real batteries I've heard positive things about Panasonics, but I've never personally used them.

 

[Ryedan]

I kept a PT eGo topped up and it did shorten the battery life very noticeably.

Yes, this is the other side of the coin. Keeping them topped up all the time really shortens battery life. IMO the best thing for Li-ion life is to charge to 80% and discharge to 40%, but life gets in the way .

I cycle through 4 Sony VTC cells right now. At 0.4 ohms in mechanical mods I use around 2 per day. I try to take them out at around 3.7V +-0.1. I fully charge 2 at a time and I don't put them on charge until I'm into the 3'rd a bit so a battery never sits with full charge for more than about half a day.

It's working for me. It's not the most efficient solution, but it's good enough so I think these batteries will last over a year and my system is easy enough for me to do. Considering the cost of batteries per day, I'm not worried about it.

 

[Susan~S]

Yes, this is the other side of the coin. Keeping them topped up all the time really shortens battery life. IMO the best thing for Li-ion life is to charge to 80% and discharge to 40%, but life gets in the way .

Interesting! Were batteries designed this way? If so, why?

 

[Ryedan]

Interesting! Were batteries designed this way? If so, why?

I don't know enough about battery engineering to know for sure Susan, but I suspect if the designers could have designed this out of the system they would have. I think these characteristics are the best deal (compromise) they could get to achieve the best overall performance with the chemicals and processes available today.

I think electric cars are really driving (bad pun I know ) the industry right now. It will be really interesting to see what gets developed next.

 

[mkbilbo]

Chemistry is what it is. You don't get to "design" it. You use the reactions that are possible.

(It's a little like asking why can't somebody "design" gasoline to yield 500 miles to the gallon. It just don't work that way.)

That said, the question is how much of your time is worth trying to squeeze some extra life out of a battery? Me, I don't have time to baby a battery I can replace for less than ten bucks. It's not worth the effort.

(Not to mention it's a thing of more concern to hobbyists and "tinker" types with mechs and sub-ohms and what not. A decent charger and device have control chips or programming to manage the batteries and their charges. And it works well enough. I'm sure if the folk who like to tinker find a way better approach, they'll sell a chip to the device makers and it'll show up in our mods. )

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[Ryedan]

Chemistry is what it is. You don't get to "design" it. You use the reactions that are possible.

(It's a little like asking why can't somebody "design" gasoline to yield 500 miles to the gallon. It just don't work that way.

You're absolutely right mkbilbo. But though ultimately chemistry and physics are set and do not change, our understanding of how it all works changes as we learn more about the world. That new knowledge allows us to better use what's out there to make better products and processes.

We probably won't ever be able to get more energy from burning a gallon of gasoline, but we will likely be able to improve the efficiency of how we use that energy, or how we burn the gas, or how we process the gas, or gain advantage by something else that I have no clue about.

And you can make miles from other things besides gasoline

Technology is neat

 

[mkbilbo]

True enough. Often by going off in another direction entirely. Li-ion displaced Ni-cad almost totally. Whatever drawbacks Li-ion has, it's still superior to what we used to use.

What I find interesting is the work in "super-capacitors". Imagine a mod that charges in sixty seconds or less...


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[dice57]

mah ratings are not as important as continuous amp ratings. A high amp batt will outperform a high mah batt. the Sony VTC5 would be an excellent choice.