Bosch battery powered portable searchlight HKEB 100

Hi!
I'm new here. I thought I am the only one who is nuts about flashlights. But then I found this forum and it's great to find so many people with the same kind of intrest.
Enough of that...
The thing I want to know about is:
I have, since I am about 14, a Bosch Battery powered portable searchlight HKEB 100.
It's a quite famouse lamp here in germany because the german police and firefighters uses it.
I had to replace the old batteries and replaced them into 4 Sanyo 1,2V 7Ah Ni-Cd in a row (4,8V).
my questions are:

1)I have the original Bosch charging attachment that uses trickle charging. Every time I place the lamp in the charging attachment it starts to trickle charge (0,26Ah/day 15 min charging at 700mA then 16h pause). I have the fear that after I use the lamp and the akku is only half way full the trickle charging will charge the lamp and I'll get a memory effect on the batteries(?).

2)For the normal charging I can choose wether to charge in 4, 8, 12 or 14h.(e.g. 1 1/2-2h of operation charge 4h is said in the manual) Shouldn't I leave the akkus unloaded till they reach a certain voltage (1,3V for Ni-Cd (I think) so that the cells will not "deepdeload"(?), )
and then load them 14 h also to avoid a memory effect?
So...I hope you can help me...
Excuse my rusted english
Thanks, Marc

My only experience with Nicds is in radio control cars and we use a car light bulbs to totally discharge the batts. then when cool charge to full (not for NIMHS. This is called cycling the batts, high end chargers will do this for you, it will help batt performance. You only need to do this every 3 or 4 times you charge. Hope this helps.

Hi,
Thanks for your reply!
My problem is that I don't know about the effect of the trickle charging and the memory effect.
Yesterday I heard from a akku specialist that you should discharge the akku till there is no power left. Theres the risk of "deepdischarging" You should leave a certain amount of voltage in the cells, 0,85V (In my text above I wrote 1,3 V this is wrong!) You shouldn't use the capacity 100%.
Can anyone agree to this?
Greetings Marc

Modern Nicds do not suffer from the so-called memory effect. Regardless of the cycle of usage, you should not see a difference in performance.

A trickle charge, if the current is too high, may damage the cells in the pack. Also, the slower the charge, the better it is for the cells, BUT a charge that's too low will not charge the batteries to full capacity.

--dan
P.S. I think I'll leave this topic here, for more responses before possibly moving it to Batteries or Spotlights...

--dan

Sorry dano - I didn't know that I was in the wrong topic. Nevertheless thanks for your posting...