Killed my batteries?

I have four powerizer RCR123 batteries and a recharger.

I put two batteries in the charger, charged them, then put them in the flashlight.

I then put the other two batteries into the charger, plugged it in, and left it.

a month later, the two batteries in the light were dying a little, so i swapped them with the batteries in the charger.

the batteries that have been in the charger for a month are almost completely dead, to the point that the light will not illuminate. I BARELY get a reading on my multimeter at the most sensitive level.

oops did i screwq the batteries by leaving them in the charger for a month? I thought i could do that.

okay... when i put the powerizer batteries into the powerizer charger, nothing happened. the light did not come on, like it did with the good pair.

I have a second charger (battery station) which the batteries work in; the light goes from green to red when the batteries are placed in. so I've put the batteries into that charger, and plugged it uin, and placed it outside on my porch with a small hand towel over it. I wonder if they'll blow up.

You guys think they can be resurected?

Hi Sgaterboy,

Deep-discharging RCR123 is a very bad idea! I assume they are not protected..

Protected cells shutt off at 2.4 volts to protect them from deep-discharge.

You must take care with cells like these: Don't leave them in charging divices longer than nessesary, no matter how expensive and regulated the charger is !!

May well be your cells are history !!! Sorry..

But I've seen cells recover from probs like these tho...


Regards,

Ra.

thanks for the fair warning; I thought they'd be fried too.


They charged for several hours, and then the light in the batterystation charger went out.

I plugged them into a digified 6p, and it worked!! I'm doing a quick runtime test now, to see if it might vent and how long they'll last.

results to follw within an hour, probably.
As for now, the brightness is identical to another digilight 6p using batterystation cells.

well, they drained OK. Flashlight is Hot as Heck as normal... recharging them now... good thing I didnt kill myself!

I think for the extra buck or so it costs per battery (see Dae's site), protection is a really, really good idea in RCR123 batteries.

Unprotected li-ions are not 'consumer' batteries yet - you're basically using a prototype laboratory-only device. They don't enough of the protections they need to make careful human supervision and management unnecessary.

In some other thread, someone said to always take unprotected cells out of the charger when the light changes. Trickle charging li-ions indefinitely is not desirable as the cells will continue to 'accept' charge and take damage in the form of permanent capacity loss after they've reached full charge, even on trickle.

Modern Ni-mh batteries do not have this problem - they have a protection device that can deal with a certain amount of overcharge indefinitely. Unprotected li-ions don't.

The cheap little chargers (i have a couple) have no off mode, they switch to a trickle mode once the cells are near the top of their charge, I suppose when the voltage reaches 4.20v or so. It would be nice if they had a definite 'auto off' mode.

In practice, I would say leave your charger where you can see it and take them out when you notice they're green.