What Am I Doing To My Batteries??

[angelique510]

I am on my third style of PV. I started with the SideSho, then moved to a 902/J118, and am now using a penstyle RN4072. When I first start using them, they work great - tons of vapor and batts last for several hours on a charge. After a few days, vapor production goes down and the charge lasts for shorter and shorter lengths of time. It takes longer to charge one than it does for one to go dead.

Is this typical? I don't see how it can be, or else there would be tons of people going back to analogs out of sheer frustration. It must be operator error, but I can't figure out what I am doing.

Can someone help? Does anyone want a bunch of dead battteries?

~A

 

[VinnieVapor]

vaping for 2.5 months now... I use model 510 and I feel the same.
Now I understand why battery mods are so popular.

One forumer sig is "soner than later you will use a mod" or something like that. He is right.

I will make myself a nicobox and I will keep my tiny batteries for when I go out.

 

[Can_supplier]

My understanding of lithium batts is that they do not like to be fully cycled from fully charged to discharged.

What I do is keep one on the charger, and I switch them long before the one I am using goes dead. At work its a vape break and then switch batteries, although there is still lots more left in the batt. I have found my batteries are keeping their strength and charge.

I find that my PV output is more linked to correct technique, not flooding and cleaning or replacing old attys. Sometimes switching bottles of juice magically gives me more vape, even if switching back to a bottle I switch from for that reason. There seems to be some black magic involved sometimes.

A voltmeter will tell you if its a problem with the batt or with another part. If the voltage is dropping then yeah its the batt. I would want to investigate before blaming the batt.

 

[ceo51378]

I agree. Most of the time, it's your atty starting to fail either from being flooded or just plain wearing out (too much burnt ejuice on the coil). You end up using your batteries more to try to compensate for the lack of vapor (taking longer drags and more often); this is especially true if you have a manual battery or mod. For me, I've never had a 510 atty die; but the performance does degrade over time. It's so gradual that you don't notice it until you switch out a new one. With a fresh atty, I am getting the vapor and throat hit in half the time (3-4 seconds instead of 6-8)that I do on my old one which basically doubles the battery life.

My advice - blow out your atty once a day and replace it every 4-6 weeks. Make sure your atty doesn't 'gurgle' - if it does, it's flooded(blow it out). Your batteries will probably only last about 4-6 months before they need replacing so keep that in mind.

 

[RjG]

The problem is the technology. To get the maximum life out of a tiny cheap lithium Ion battery, you shouldn't be sucking more than 1C out of it. 1C means for every milliamp-hour of capacity the battery has, the load can be that many milliamps.

These ecig batteries are around 160 to 200 milliamp-hour capacity - but the load is around 1.5 amps, or 1500 milliamps - which means when you draw on your e-cig, you are sucking current of around 10 times what would be normally be considered a maximum load on the battery of this size.

What happens is the batteries wear out fast. If you take a lot of full 5 second puffs, your batteries will wear out even faster, compared to someone who takes 2 second puffs.

As the battery wears - the capacity goes DOWN, and the internal resistance of the cell goes UP. That means that the voltage drop gets bigger and bigger when you put a load on the battery.

For example, when you fully charge your battery - it is at 4.2 volts. A NEW battery will drop to around 3.8 volts AS you are taking a puff on it.

The same battery 6 weeks later, still charged up to 4.2 volts, will drop to 3.4 or even 3.2 volts as you take a puff on it.

Soon after that, the battery will either not charge anymore, or the useful voltage - under load - will be so low that it doesn't vape well anymore, or the battery's own low voltage protection circuit kicks in making it totally useless.

This is also why modders use nice big batteries like 14500s... they are 5 times bigger, capacity wise, and it's a bit better match to the job they are trying to do.

 

[vapinfool]

I'm new to this, only one week now. My PV was working fine, I got up this morning and took a drag and the cart came out, and wouldn't fit back in.. I thought that was strange, it was really loose. I looked at it and it had melted some, and my battery was completely dead. How safe are these batteries? I'm a little worried now about burning the house down or something.. Should I be taking them apart each night when I'm not using them? Are they safe to charge and walk away from?
Anyway, I am sure I had a horrid look on my face when I tried to drag and it smelled and tasted like when you light the wrong end of an analog.. 8-oLOL

I do have a 510 coming soon.. I was disappointed I had to resort to analogs today

Thanks!
Vapinfool in paradise!!

 

[WillyB]

Should I be taking them apart each night when I'm not using them?

Yes. Anytime I let them sit, or shove in my pocket I unscrew them enough to break contact.

 

[vapinfool]

Thanks WillyB I'll do that now! Live and learn I guess!