Dead Riva battery?

[pineaway]

Alrighty I got a Riva about a month ago (love it). The other day I used the battery til it gave me the blinking light signal that it was dead. When I came home, I put it on the charger as usual. Next day, I threw on an atty and....nothing. Looking at the battery itself, when pressing the button it would light up, then give me the blinking light. Putting it back on the charger seemingly does nothing as the light does not turn red; indicating that it is fully charged. It is not a faulty atty as it works fine on my other Riva battery as well as my Silver Bullet.

Do you guys think this is a dead battery or am I doing something wrong?

 

[Kurt]

Well, it might be dead, but there are a couple other possibilities.

1. Check that there is no excess juice on either the batt threads or the charger port. juice can kill the connection of the batt with the charger. I had the same thing happen with some of my 510 batts because of this.

2. Check for electrolysis junk buildup on both batt threads and charger port. Over time it will deposit. A good stout paper-toweling will remove any buildup (it will look blackish).

Most charger indicator lights when charging the battery will be red, but blink every 5 seconds green, then go back to red almost immediately. So a brief blink of green with otherwise red. Not sure if yours does this normally, but if it does in general (check with the good battery), and it is NOT doing this blink with the suspect battery, that battery is not getting charged.

Depending on your charger, if it charges the batt to "full" very quickly, this is convenient, of course, but it can be charging too fast. This will over time diminish the charging capacity of the battery, and eventually the battery does not hold charge.

Most batteries are expected to last about 5 weeks or so. Most last much longer than that, but yours may well just be done. The damage that I described in fast charging happens anyway over time, no matter what, and so you may have just finished this one off.

Always good to have several spares!
Good luck!

 

[billo]

I, too, thought I had a dead battery once, but it was the crummy charger.

When you put the battery on the charger you may have to push and twist it UNTIL the light turns red. This can be a little tricky sometimes.

Once the light turns red, DON'T TOUCH IT ! Then it will charge .

 

[Abe]

Quite often, the Riva charger centre pin does not contact the battery centre pin. We have experienced this quite a bit with the latest batch of Riva chargers.