Will This Charger Cook Your HT Batteries?

[CanesFan95]

For an MA/COM P7100, is it safe to leave a battery (or a radio with the battery) on this charger after the light is solid green and charging is finished? Or will it cook/overcharge the battery? The reason I ask is because I've noticed the battery pack stays very warm and am concerned this charger might be slowly ruining the battery. One weekend, I left the radio on this charger and the following Monday, it was real real warm.

 

[rbrtklamp2]

I'd say it's a use your best judgment situation. I have APX radios that stay in the charger for days and don't get hot in fact with impres batteries the smart charger knows when to charge and when to stop. That being said I don't much about MA
COM equipment, but I bets it the battery getting old and not the charger. Have you tried letting a new battery charge for a few days to see if it gets warm as well. Your original battery maybe getting old and starting to show signs of wear and use if it's been charged 1000 times. I'd try a new battery to rule out whether it's the batteries or the charger.

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[CanesFan95]

This actually was on a new battery.

 

[rbrtklamp2]

Yeah then maybe it is overcharging in which case ibwould remove them when they are completely charged. I don't know how hot it will get but it's always better to be safe than sorry in my opinion. Now warm is normal for charging batteries but if it's getting hot I would remove it.

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[CanesFan95]

That's what I've been doing, to be safe. I just wonder if there are any known issues with this particular charger model. These batteries don't seem to have very good shelf life, after about 3-4 weeks, they lose a lot of their charge without even being used.

 

[rbrtklamp2]

Huh that sucks man. Sorry I can't be of more help than use common sense. If it were about Moto stuff I could gladly give you battery specs and all that other good stuff but like I said just not familiar enough with MA COM to say anything definitive. Good luck with it.

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[rbrtklamp2]

Man I really hoped someone else would chime in here and help out. I hope it's not a fire hazard but then again if the batteries are getting that hot you know you have problem.

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[mm]

Are your batteries OEM or aftermarket and the original capacity?

I use the same charger with OEM packs and the charger reverts to trickle charge at~90% of fast charge and the packs do stay warm when left in the charger but never hot.

I have one aftermarket pack which is a higher capacity than the OEM pack and it takes longer to charge which does increase the pack temperature but even with this pack I have good operating life.

I get 2-3 years out of my packs and I rotate 3 packs between one radio.

 

[TDR-94]

Once the charger indicator light indicates 'steady green' it is in trickle charge mode.It's keeping the battery "topped off" so it stays fully charged while it's in the charger.

These battery packs don't use LSD cells,so they loose their charge after sitting for days,more quickly.These battery packs are meant to be used in environments where they will be discharged and charged on a daily basis,not sitting unused for weeks or months at a time.LSD cells are required for those types of situations.

 

[Rred]

Call the maker and find out how that particular charger works. With four terminals, it COULD be just like a good OEM charger, which automatically throttles back and cannot overcharge an OEM battery for weeks on end.

Or, a cheap-*** charger, or battery, which has no thermal sensor and no charging control logic, can continue to apply a fast charge forever, which exceeds what any battery can withstand.

There's no way to know what you've got, except the general rule that no-name batteries and chargers usually are cheap for a reason.

On the second point, losing the charge in a month? Yeah, that's a sign of cheap-*** NiCad or NiMh batteries. The good ones (Panasonic, Eneloop, etc.) can hold 75% charge after a year on the shelf. Many brands will hold 50% for six months on the shelf. Cheapos? Dead in 30-90 days. All you can do with those is keep them in a trickle charger (even cheap ones should be able to take a 1/10C charge rate forever) or try to return them.

Personally I cringe whenever I have to replace batteries. The OEM ones are always ludicrous in price, and the aftermarket ones are counterfeit junk so much of the time that you really have to pick a supplier (like Bulldog Battery or the NiCad Lady, or a good commercial brand from Mouser or Digikey) and skip all of the "radio" second market as well as the unknown internet sources.

 

[ElroyJetson]

It's fine to leave the battery in over the weekend or for a few days. But I've seen radios that were the emergency radios for schools and they left the radios, with batteries, in the charger ALL THE TIME and that eventually caused the battery to fail, corrode, and corrode the battery contacts on the radio, making the radios useless unless they got repaired. Which was stupid and preventable, but hey, what do you expect from a school office worker who has had zero training in proper ways to use and maintain a radio?

 

[TDR-94]

On the second point, losing the charge in a month? Yeah, that's a sign of cheap-*** NiCad or NiMh batteries. The good ones (Panasonic, Eneloop, etc.) can hold 75% charge after a year on the shelf. Many brands will hold 50% for six months on the shelf.

Panasonic Eneloops are Low Self Discharge cells and 'will' hold 75-80% of their charge after sitting unused for a year at room temperature.Harris M/A-COM NiMH battery packs are not using LSD cells.They use standard Panasonic NiMH cells which lose about 5% percent of their charge per day sitting unused at room temperature.On the other hand,the Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer battery packs,by their very nature,are LSD.