old4570
Flashlight Enthusiast
For review , the MarsFire Sanyo Battery ...
Supplied for review by Manafont(dot)com
What we have are Sanyo 2600 (18650) batteries with a protection circuit added and clear wrap used so we can see the cell used . It is regular practice to buy a cell , add a protection circuit and a attractive wrapper with your name on it , and in the last few years all sorts of names and claims have been added to such wrappers , offering prospective buyers what I like to call dumpster quality batteries (due to the incredibly bad cells used inside the wrappers - possibly out of a rubbish bin) . Well not always , sometimes it turns out you have a good battery .
So it is refreshing to see a change to this trend , clear plain wrapping so that we can see the cell used , and no outrageous capacity claims ...
Manafonts product description :
Sanyo - Protected 18650 High Capacity Rechargeable Battery
- Sanyo brand you can trust
- Rechargeable 18650 battery
- High capacity
- Protected
Lets move onto the battery Dimensions :
Battery 1 , 68.6mm Long , 18.4mm in Diameter
Battery 2, 68.5mm Long , 18.4mm in Diameter
Testing:
The first thing was to do a direct comparison against a unprotected Sanyo 2600 battery to see if the protection circuit hampers the excellent discharge capability of the Sanyo 2600 .
To this end I used 3 XM-L flashlights , one being equiped with my insane Manafont supplied 3 mode XM-L P60 drop in , which is a real power hog !
2nd part of the testing is discharging the batteries for capacity , now I have do admit to stuffing up here , I forgot to check the Turnigy to make sure it was calibrated correctly , which it was not , so the results for the 1A test are on the low side as the charger terminated too early (Charger was reading battery voltage 3 tenths too low , so terminated at 3.3v rather than 3v) I really dont have time to re-run the 1A capacity test (apologies) . But all subsequent discharges have been set up correctly to compensate for the error in the Turnigy charger.
Discharge results , as can be seen the MarsFire batteries have done extremely well , 5 amps and 5.3 amps with the manafont P60 drop in , and if memory serves , the unprotected Sanyo 2600 is the better of two Sanyo 2600's I own . And honestly , at this level , the variation simply comes down to individual cells . And in the lights which are regulated to 2.8A the performance is right on the money . A rose by any other name ! , in this case MarsFire .
Sanyo 2600 Test from a while back ! [ resulted in 2471mAh @ 1A ] , so looks like these are right on the money if not better than previous cells I got .
Hmmm , interesting , I used a faster charger to charge cell 1 , and it returned a lower discharge result ...
Im going to have to repeat that , and charge the battery much slower ...
But in any-ways :
Look like genuine Sanyo cells , the batteries have performed well , and I personally do like the 18650 Sanyo batteries .
Id like to thank Manafont for the opportunity to test these batteries , and I hope the information is useful for any prospective buyers .
OK a bit of an update : I recharged cell 1 @ 300mAh last night and it returned 2151mAh @ 3A discharge , hmmm , a 51mAh improvement ..
I might repeat that and see what happens ..
Did try an experiment a while back with charge rates , might continue on that path with this cell ...
UPDATE INFO:
OK been very busy testing these batteries , last but not least :
Overcharge and over discharge protection results ....
Overcharge seems to cut in real early , one battery @ 4.2v and the other 4.21v
Testing overcharge ? Simple , I have a charger that charges to 4.35v [ Samsung 30A ] , so by placing the battery in the bay that goes to 4.35 I can see where the overcharge protection cuts in , simple ...
Over discharge , ok seems to cut in around 2.3v , Sanyo are rated to 2.75v , so perhaps a little generous ...
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