Batteries Sizzle

greg987

Newly Enlightened
Joined
Jan 17, 2007
Messages
8
Last night, I charged a 7.2V Ni-Cd battery pack at 1C with a Triton2 charger. The battery pack started to make a sizzling sound, so i immediately stopped charging. The pack was not hot (or even very warm). The charger is new, and in the past, I used a slow timed charger. Does the sizzling sound indicate that the pack is bad and needs to be thrown away?
 
I see this is your first post so I am assuming you just found this form and haven't read a lot and maybe do not have a lot of knowledge with batteries and charging them.

If I am wrong please don't get too mad at me.

It would help if you list the capacity of your battery pack and the settings your Triton. You may have one of them set improperly. Just recently I wrote a post asking a pretty simple question and it turns out I had one setting wrong.

Back to your question.......I would have to say that a sizzling sound is not good.
 
If the batteries aren't hot, I would hazard a guess that there are some wires in the pack that are seeing too much current, overheating and melting their insulation. Whether they are undersized for that current or the charger is set up wrong, I can't say.

Melted insulation is dangerous...I would probably check inside the pack before more serious use.
 
The battery pack is 2000mah, and I charged it at 2A. The sizzling sound occured after about 30 minutes. After disconnecting the pack, it continued to sizzle for maybe 3 minutes more. It sounded like it came from within the batteries, not from the wires. Also, if it were the wires, I don't think it would continue after being disconnected. A previous test showed that the pack holds about 75-80% of its rated capacity (I got it used and possibly abused).
 
There are manufacturing defects in cells also, so don't immediately assume you had a wrong setting. I recently was charging a set of new Amondo Titanium 1800mAh NiMH AA's with my Hyperion 1210i charger set at 900mA (0.5C).

They were in a welded 8s pack, and had been condition charged with magnet leads before being shrink wrapped to full at 200mAh for about 10 hrs, rested for about 5 hours, and discharged to 1.0V without any problems. Another rest of about 3 hours, and about 700mA at the 0.5C rate had been put in these mostly discharged cells, when I heard the broken circuit alarm go off.

When I looked at them, two were leaking acid from the top vent holes.

I put on rubber gloves, goggles, and carefully inspected the cells. There was no obvious source of defects or shorts. These were not dropped, soldered, or abused in any way. It happens.
 
Okay, thanks for the replies. I was mostly wondering if battery sizzling is the result of an end-of-life condition, and how common it is. I would think that heat from higher internal resistance would be a contributing factor, but as I stated the cells weren't very warm at all.
 

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