Looking for low quality, poor performing batteries

Greetings Everyone,

I need some recommendations for low quality, poor performing 18650 lithium-ion, CR123 lithium primary and AA NiMH batteries that I can purchase online.

I know that this sounds like an odd request, but I am doing performance and reliability studies on some relatively high quality commercial batteries (at least I think that they are high quality) and I want to include some low quality batteries of the same type in the study to see if the testing regimen that I am developing will show a difference between the low and high quality cells.

I understand that you might not want to bad mouth a particular manufacturer or supplier, so feel free to PM me with your recommendations. Also, I will not be posting any of the recommendations that are sent to me via PM.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers,
BG

From what I've heard...*most* of the 18650's on eprey are junk clones.

I personally have no issue whatsoever in dealing strictly with dealers supporting CPF (especially AW...he's my go to battery guy).

"Looking for low quality, poor performing batteries"

OK, that is a bit different!

As Nasty mentioned, fleabay is a good place to start, as well as most of the xxxxxFire cells available from most popular dealers. It's difficult to be certain though, as some of these cells are actually pretty decent. That's the problem, inconsistency, you never know what you're going to get.

As for NiMH cells, the most popular (probably) Hong Kong Web dealer offers some cells that most have found to be highly over rated capacity wise, however that doesn't necessarily mean the cells are either, low quality, or poor performing, I guess. Too bad you can't come up with some "new" Energizer 2500 AA cells!


Unfortunately thinking, I haven't bought that many really bad cells of either chemistry over the years. I've either been lucky, or paid attention to what others have experienced, and am really not much help, I guess.

It will be interesting to see how your testing turns out, BG. Good luck in your quest for the ultimate bad cell!

Dave

Angelfire CR123's?
I don't have experience with these batteries, but wouldn't trust them.
You can get them at ebay

radio shack enercell should do it, the worst nimh i had.

Crap NiMH? I never saw a good comment about BTY batteries :thumbsdow

I have some Targus brand 2700 mAh cells that came bundled with a charger. They were at 0 V out of the package and could never achieve more than about 1600 mAh on the C9000. More interestingly, this last weekend I put them on my GP Smart 2 charger (2 A charge rate, −∆V termination). Two of the cells reached 60°C before the charger terminated. They were hot hot hot. (The charger might have hit the max temperature cut-off.) When I test them now, I get varying voltage readings, 0.9 V or 1.0 V or 1.3 V depending on how I angle and press the meter probes on the cell. I think the internal continuity is compromised and I'm wondering if the heat had anything to do with it.

So, to cut a long story short, one measure of cell quality might be how well they stand up to the recommended 1C fast charge rate.

If you can still find some, check the Duracell AA 2650 mA/h.
They increase their internal resistance consistently at 0.02 Ohm per full cycle.
They are dead after 50 cycles: a monument to bad engineering.

Regards

Anthony

GP 1800 mah AA nimh batteries, the orange and green ones are very mislabeled. Qualitywise they are below average, though consistent. I've tested about 75 of these at work. They have high internal resistance so can not do high discharges without getting hot and sagging in volts. Also they were a consistent 600 mah under a 1 amp discharge rate. I suppose you could stretch it and say they were 800 mah but in no way under any testing circumstance are they 1800 mah. Out of the 75 about 2 were bad out of the box and later 8 of them went bad after about a year of near continuous cycling, about 250 cycles. The rest seem to have stabilized and should make it to 1000 cycles or four years.

As for cheap 18650's you can search on this site for bad 18650 brands such as the infamous "Goop" and "Wow" batteries. But you can't paint all xfire 18650's with a bad brush as some of the Trustfire 18650's actually outperformed AW cells in a test, ending up with more capacity and less sag than the venerable AW. Dealextremes revies tend to be a pretty good indicator of popularity if you can maintain 4-5 stars and have at least 10 reviews. This is especially true if some of the expert users post with actual scientifically gleaned info such as actual test results.

The Dealer-We-Dare-Not-Name still shows Golston CR123A cells in stock.

GODP 18650
ASUCELL
Spiderfire 18650
dx/sku.14 for Primaries
GTL18650 of course [ only sux's for capacity ]
Ultrafire BRC3000 / 3600 [ both are rather bad ]

Ray_of_Light said:

If you can still find some, check the Duracell AA 2650 mA/h.
They increase their internal resistance consistently at 0.02 Ohm per full cycle.
They are dead after 50 cycles: a monument to bad engineering.

Regards

Anthony

Click to expand...

The black and green ones ?

old4570 said:

The black and green ones ?

Click to expand...

Yes...

Anthony

Oh, if only could you find a Lidl store (German chain that also has stores here in Finland). They sell "Tronic" brand AA NiMHs that are ultimate junk. I bought eight, and I could push the best of the "2500 mAh" batteries to about 700 mAh after several refresh cycles. I guess at least some of the poor performance comes from the fact that the cells had been packaged empty and/or stored for a very long period, the voltages were between 0.1 and 0.8 V out of the carton. I have been told the NiMHs don't exactly like such low voltages.

Ultrafire BRC18650 3600mAh are the cells you want :devil:

Considering I only got 600 mah out of my cheap cells it could be assumed that some of the manufacturers are purposefully relabeling old nicd's as nimh because as I recall nicd AA's seemed to peak at about 800 mah before nimh stepped in starting at 1600 mah, double the capacity. I wish I could tear some apart AND do a mass spectrometry on them. If I found cadmium I'd love to spearhead a lawsuit against the manufacturer. Heck you may just find mercury and or lead in them too.

Kaamos said:

Oh, if only could you find a Lidl store (German chain that also has stores here in Finland). They sell "Tronic" brand AA NiMHs that are ultimate junk. I bought eight, and I could push the best of the "2500 mAh" batteries to about 700 mAh after several refresh cycles. I guess at least some of the poor performance comes from the fact that the cells had been packaged empty and/or stored for a very long period, the voltages were between 0.1 and 0.8 V out of the carton. I have been told the NiMHs don't exactly like such low voltages.

Click to expand...

Crap, I just got a bunch of them. They were labeled with their manufacturing date just some months ago, hope this will mean at least a couple of them works.

Wow! Thanks for all of the recommendations! This is very helpful. Thanks everyone.

Cheers,
BG

KentS said:

Crap, I just got a bunch of them. They were labeled with their manufacturing date just some months ago, hope this will mean at least a couple of them works.

Click to expand...

I had several of them too. They were consistent in one thing: all of them losed capacity with every charge and they had about 80% of the stated capacity initially.

Funny thing is I keep reading people in some forums saying they are great cells I wonder what kind of crap they are used to.

Please delete, dup post