BR330T only draining 2 batteries out of 3?

[RedPenguin]

I have been using some rechargeable batteries in my BR330T and noticed something which seems a tad bit weird.

My recharger randomly stopped wanting to rechargeable one of the 3 batteries even though I hardly used said batteries.

Anyway, I decided to put them on my Multimeter which has a nice battery testing function, and oddly enough it claimed the battery had full power, yet obviously the other ones did not.

I had charged each battery 100% according to my charger, so I think that should rule out what I believe they call backcharging or where mixing full and weak batteries can cause havoc.

Is this normal behavior, bad battery or what? I never seen/heard of this before.

 

[DaveIN]

I've seen this too. It usually means one of the cells is going bad or could have been weaker to begin with. If your recharger has a refresh/analyzer built in you'll most likely see that the cell doesn't have the strength in mAh that the others do.

 

[linuxwrangler]

Could be lots of things. There are lots of ways for cells to fail. Some short out, others fail open, many seem to charge but don't have much capacity, and some will just self-discharge at a highly accelerated rate.

Unfortunately, a multi-meter battery checker is limited in what it can check. I like my Maha C9000 since I can use the various functions to test and analyze the cells. Recently a friend commented that a pair of lithium cells way outlasted his NiMh. I ran a few tests starting with a standard refresh/analyze and then tried the discharge test after one, three and five days of sitting and determined that one of his NiMh cells lost half-capacity in a few hours and was fully dead in about four days.

The nice thing about a good charger is that it takes out most of the guesswork in these situations.