How low do they go? - NiMH batteries and devices which use them. Discharge how much?

With NiMH batteries (yes I know, for those Lithium people...NiMH very primitive. Take some Lithium salts )

How low do most devices discharge them for your usage. In a flashlight you would decide it is too dim, other devices would refuse to power on, whatever criteria you choose for "discharged".

Which is to say for those of you with smart chargers, how many volts remain if you put them in the charger after draining them in a flashlight or whatever use you have for the NiMH batteries.

Most chargers default to auto-charging, and volts output will only be accurate under load, so perhaps put the charger in discharge mode to find out (charger will usually proceed to charge, or you can put it back with a few button presses).

Please post with

Name of Device: remaining Volts under load
Directional Microphone 1.02, 1.00 and 1.01v remaining (uses 3 batteries)

Thanks in advance.

Usually, with NiMH, you want to stop when your light gets dim. At this point, voltage is likely around 1.0-1.1V. And this is as low as you want to go.

Actually, I'm not sure... what's been given here is the resting voltage of the batteries, but this might be at the very end of the discharge curve where the resting voltage recovers after the voltage under load already was much lower.

However, here are some under-load cutoff voltages I observed...
Yamaha PSR-E443 keyboard: 4.8 V (runs on 6 AA batteries or mains adaptor)
Wall clock: 1.21 V (one AA cell) (yes, really that high... still manages to use rechargeables though)
Philips D-8334 boombox (now defunct): Tape slows down below 5.5 V, although radio works down to about 3 V (operates on 6 D cells)
Original Nintendo Gameboy: about 3.0 V (from 4 AA batteries)

I'm not so sure about the other devices I regularly use since I usually try to prevent the batteries from getting fully depleted in order to give them a better cycle life and also in order not having to swap them at an awkward moment like out on the street... to that end, I normally don't wait until they are fully depleted, but set an interval based on my usage or measure their remaining voltage... this is also how I manage to use only one dedicated set of batteries for each device without any spares.

StorminMatt said:

Usually, with NiMH, you want to stop when your light gets dim. At this point, voltage is likely around 1.0-1.1V. And this is as low as you want to go.

Click to expand...

...try to prevent the batteries from getting fully depleted in order to give them a better cycle life

Click to expand...

Thanks for adding to the list - feedback.

The person over at AACycler.com is testing the optimal minimums (1.1v/cell vs 1.0v vs 0.9v) - Many charger/analyzers go down to 0.9, a similar number go down to 1.0v.
Your numbers (except wall clock) are for groups of cells (a battery ) of course unless carefully capacity matched the individual cells might have voltages all over the place.
So to restate...
Yamaha PSR-E443 keyboard: 4.8v/6 = 0.80 avg.
Philips D-8334 boombox (now defunct): 5.5v/6 = 0.91 avg
Original Nintendo Gameboy: about 3.0v/4 = 0.75 avg