Have I killed my RC123s?

[BenjiBot]

I took my 5Mega 3xAW RC123 holder out of my light last night and noticed the terminals were covered in dry gray gunk. With the batteries in place I cleaned up the contacts with wire wool, which I suspect was a bad move – the thing sparked a bit, nothing alarming, I stopped and removed the batteries. Despite being fully charged they ran flat after five minutes; 48 hours later the light dies after about 50 seconds of use. Have I killed my 3xAW RC123s by wire-wooling my terminals?

 

[Morelite]

You may just have a bad protection circuit on one of the cells. Do you have a single cell light to try each cell separatly or a meter to test each one?

 

[stefanj]

Well I'm not saying that wire wooling the terminals is a good idea- but if you had done any real damage you would have known it pretty quick (actually you may not have lived to tell about it) I would suspect you got a bad cell or protection circuit. Test each battery separately and see if you can figure out which one went bad- and honestly at the cost of these cells it may be a good idea just to replace them all- cascade failure is a pretty serious event and I'm guessing something you really don't to experience.

 

[VidPro]

I took my 5Mega 3xAW RC123 holder out of my light last night and noticed the terminals were covered in dry gray gunk. With the batteries in place I cleaned up the contacts with wire wool, which I suspect was a bad move – the thing sparked a bit, nothing alarming, I stopped and removed the batteries. Despite being fully charged they ran flat after five minutes; 48 hours later the light dies after about 50 seconds of use. Have I killed my 3xAW RC123s by wire-wooling my terminals?

is this a trick question
i back up what you said, using my rewind button, and i see that you had terminals "covered" in dry gray gunk?

and THEN you started cleaning it.
the protection must be working, because wire wool does all sorts of cool things when shorted with high output batteries
these are protected cells your talking about?

now your getting , some very short runtime, but you are getting power for a bit ? right?

i assume you have the holder wired in series?

so my next assumption (which could be very wrong) would be WHAT IS THE GUNK

 

[BenjiBot]

Thanks for this suggestion.

@Morelite
I ran each AW RC123 in my NovaTac and each battery started stepping down within a couple of minutes of use. This is despite the full charge I gave them on Saturday after the initial wire wool incident (light has had no more than 10 minutes use since that last charge). So is it possible that I have somehow killed the batteries ability to hold a charge?

@VidPro
The cells are protected AW R123s, and yes I get about a minute of power before the light cuts out. The gray gunk just seems to be metal residue, probably caused by the tail spring gouging metal off of the holder's negative terminal. The contact point is pretty scarred up.

Thanks for reading