need your help with MH-C9000

[distrbd]

Hi all .
As you can see this is my first post and I would like to start by asking your help with a simple question.
I have just bought a MH-C9000 charger which will be here Tomorrow,I intend to revive some rechargeable batteries,four in particular are only a year old they are 2700 hi-mh (Duracell) I have only charged them about 20 times but the last time I tried to use them in my camera they showed almost empty even though I had just charged them for 8 hours,so what I did was to discharge them in my camera,and recharged them again but I still get the same result.
Now That I will have a MH-C9000 I don't know if I should use the "break-in" mode or "analyze-refresh? and I'm not sure if I should enter the charge/discharge rates myself or should I let the charger decide?
Please take me through it if you could,the manual seems a bit overwhelming for a first time user.
I know things will make more sense after a few days of fiddling with it but I really like to know what to do once I have the charger , what is the easiest way to revive these batteries.
I appreciate your input.
Ken.

 

[Mr Happy]

I would not do a break-in straight away. What I would do is first of all discharge them at 500 mA to make sure they are empty, and then run a refresh/analyze on them at 1000 mA charge, 500 mA discharge. This will give an indication of their present capacity so that you have a starting figure to work from.

The refresh/analyze will leave them fully charged, so run another 500 mA discharge and see if the capacities increased at all. If they did, you can repeat the refresh/analyze cycle until there is no more increase.

The capacity you measure will not be 2700 mAh (the rating is always optimistic), but it should be greater than 2000 mAh.

After this, you might try a break-in cycle to see if you can improve them further. For the break-in cycle enter the real capacity measured, or just use 2000 mAh if the measured capacity is less than that.

When you have done all that, you could probably just go out and buy some eneloops. :thumbsup:

The C9000 is a very good charger and an excellent way to care for your batteries, but there is no substitute for buying really good batteries. ;)

 

[SilverFox]

Hello Ken,

Welcome to CPF.

Just to give you another option... :)

I would put the cells in the charger, select discharge, and do a discharge at the default 500 mA.

Then I would jump immediately to doing a Break-In. I would set the Break-In value to 2700 mAh and see what you end up with.

After the break in, you can run some refresh and analyze cycles to see how the cells perform under differing charging and discharging rates.

I think it is important to start out with the Break-In because its purpose is to evenly distribute the electrolyte in the cell. This will give you the best chance of achieving the highest performance from the cells. As Mr Happy has indicated, you can also achieve this with some charge/discharge cycles, but the Break-In mode does it better.

If the Break-In value is below 80% of the labeled value, recycle the cells and move on.

Tom

 

[distrbd]

Excellent replies,thank you both,I'll let you know the out come.
Keeping my fingers crossed.
Ken.