Ahem... batteries.. Got a better Idea?
heatherfeather
Registered Users Posts: 2,738 Major grins
I finally got to my taxes and out of curiosity added up of all the batteries I used last year........ and discovered that I spent over $1300 on Energizer Ultimate Lithium AAs for my speedlights!!! :huh And I know I lost a couple receipts too. I'd really rather not spend quite that much this year.
Anyway... I have a bunch of NiMH rechargables, but I haven't been all that happy with the recycle time, and even less happy with how quickly they discharge on their own... is there anything better out there?
I have the Powerex 2700 rechargables.
Maybe I am just charging/ using them wrong?
Anyway... I have a bunch of NiMH rechargables, but I haven't been all that happy with the recycle time, and even less happy with how quickly they discharge on their own... is there anything better out there?
I have the Powerex 2700 rechargables.
Maybe I am just charging/ using them wrong?
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They're probably expensive, but they gotta be less than $1300.
Some flashes want the higher voltage of the alkaline or lithium chemistries for faster cycle time, but will tend to drain a set of cells pretty fast. If that's the case, an external battery pack is probably the answer.
At the moment, my light kit (5xPW2, 3x 580ex2, a couple of old V285s, misc other stuff) probably contains about $250 worth of NiMH cells; some of them are going into their third year of service. I love them so much that even my clocks and remotes at home now run on NiMH (I got tired of the damage caused by leaky alkalines). In fact, I don't think I even OWN any alkaline cells anymore; not even in the smoke detectors.
The most critical thing with NiMH batteries is to charge them right, and do so shortly before you use them. (more below)
As others have said, there are external battery adapters available for almost all brands of speedlights. In some cases, AC power adapters are also available. In most cases, there are third-party battery adaptors, too, but you should read the reviews on those. . . some have a history of over-powering and damaging speedlights, and the speedlight manufacturers will often refuse a warranty claim if a third-party external pack is in the equation. In any case, an external pack will improve your shot-to-shot times, and give you more shots per battery change *in a given day.*
One thing to bear in mind is that the faster you cycle a flash, the more heat builds up in the charging electronics. The flash is built to take a little of that, but if you bulk up on batteries and start shooting like a bad disco light show, you'll burn up your speedlight/s. THAT gets expensive, and the warranty service guys start asking questions about the time your third flash comes in for repair. (DAHIK)
All that said, I use two basic types of NiMH battery, of several brands. I've been relatively happy with the Sony and Sanyo brands, basically satisfied with Duracell, and less so with Lenmar and the big national brand with whose name starts with Ener_. In fact, I recommend staying away from that last brand, due to some expensive/painful learning experiences. I understand that the Lenmars are getting better QC now, so YMMV. . . ask around.
So now, the trade off: even the high-quality, high-capacity, high-output cells (good for fast recycle and shooting endurance) tend to have a high self-discharge rate. As long as you have good chargers and prep your gear carefully JUST BEFORE a shoot, I find that the High-cap NiMH have the best long-term recycle rate and shots-per-battery-change of any of the chemistries I've tried, all other things being equal.
(as an aside: If you (or someone you know) are good with a soldering iron, you can get 4500-5500mAh 'sub-c' cells at a hobby shop, as used in Radio Control cars and airplanes, and assemble them into an external pack. Be very careful, though; A set of THOSE cells could conceivably start your car engine, and they will also happily burn up wires, electronics and metallic objects (jewelry, keys, pocket knives, etc.) if you get careless and short them out. But for recycle time and shooting endurance, they can't be beat. (self-discharge, again, will be high))
There are also NiMH cells that are sold as 'precharged' and will hold a charge for extended periods (a year or more to 1/2 charge). I have several sets of those; I use them in my PWIIs and in my walking-around kit. They work quite well, but in a speedlite, the recycle times are noticeably slower than the higher-capacity versions. It's important to only use a slow-charger (6-8 hours or longer) to recharge these low-discharge units, lest you damage the cell through overheating.
Which brings up the question of chargers: I use slow chargers and only charge batteries the day before a shoot, for three reasons:
One, Charging a NiMH will cause it to heat up some, and the faster the charge rate, the more heat evolves. Heat is bad for batteries. Putting a hot battery directly into service is bad for the equipment it's in, too.
Two, a slower charge will actually put more energy back into the cell before the charger senses that the cell is 'full'
Three: a given battery has a limited number of charge-cycles before it begins to degrade in capacity. The fact is, even the best batteries self-discharge, and I may go a couple of weeks between location shoots with all my lights, so I always end up charging batteries right before a shoot anyway. Why do the work twice while cutting the useful life of my investment?
Four: the discipline of having to charge batteries encourages me do all the other gear-prep/care things that make a shoot go smooth.
A note on chargers: the better chargers will monitor and charge each cell separately; this method will yield the best shooting endurance and extend the useful charge cycle life from a given set of cells. I've built my own, but there are some very good ones on the market. I have seen several recommendations right here in this forum.
I have a 15 minute, cigarette lighter- or wall-powered charger that I carry with me to long shoots, as a just-in-case measure. I don't like using it, because it makes the cells really hot. Temperature extremes are the enemy of batteries; heat destroys the delicate membranes that make a battery a battery, and cold limits the output and capacity of the cell. The typical NiMH will give best service right around human body temperature.
A final tip from an old RC junkie: mark your cells in sets as soon as you remove them from the blister pack, and charge and *use* them ONLY in those sets. Doing so serves several purposes, all of which improve performance:
1) each cell in the set will have very, very close to the the same charge capacity and discharge rates, keeping any one cell from holding back the rest;
2) the cells in a set will age at about the same rate, both in time and number of charge cycles, extending the benefits of (1) above.
3) when you inevitably drop or mix up a handfull of batteries while hurrying, you will be able to tell at a glance which ones are ones you were trying to put away, and which ones are fresh and should go back into the flash.
I hope I haven't swamped you with too much information. . . if there are other questions, I'll try to be more succinct.
edit: tips on better performance
I use Canon equipment + battery packs, so overheating isn't as big of an issue....
I think what I need to do is get some very nice chargers... a whole bunch of them and charge all the batteries at the same time, the night before a shoot. I think these powerex should be good enough if I could just get the charging part down correctly........ I am going to experiment this week.
I buy the fastest-charge, highest-rated batteries I can, and always have many - MANY sets - read to go to power my 430ex and 420ex.
It's not perfect since yeah, they do start to slow recycling time once you get cooking - I think if I was doing more of these long portrait sessions and/or making my full-time living doing this I'd just invest in an external pack - but for my needs, it's worked well.
Nimh 2500 is what I use.
I have three sets of 4. I charge them the day before an event.
One fresh set for each speedlight and one set of spares.
Halfway through the event I put in the spares in my main flash I am using.
I always use a lot of ambient and high Iso so my flashes never overheat and the batteries seem to last forever.
I have been shooting with the same 12 batteries for the last 20 weddings or so...should probably replace them.
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I fell into a situation where one battery goes bad out of 4 and I don't know which one so I had to toss them all. This charger lets you know which one is bad and will actually bring it back to life with discharge and charge cycles.
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I knew there was something I omitted above........the Power es smart charger.....as to conditioning......it should only be done once or twice a year at the most......conditioning more often is actually detrimental to the batts...........
I purchased LenMar's and I am not having as good a luck as I did with duracells rechargables.....eveyone in ICT has wuit carrying duracells that I know of.....walmart Kroger (dillions), kmart, target......the actual battery stores.......not enuff profit margin....so I have 2 15 minute duracell chargers and now 2 1 hr lenmar chargers.
The bad thing about batts is no one want to allow for returns if the dang things do not perform as needed.............come on Al Jacobs and get my Nikon cables into production.....dang it
I was buying a lithuim for my lightmeter and a guy came in complaining about his cost of batteries.....the tech asked him if he owned a simple 9.95 multimeter....he said no.....the tech told him that he needed to start checking his batts....as it is very seldom that all 4 alkalines would die together....it was more than likely just 1 bad battery.......he walked out with a el cheapo multi meter and 8 duracells..........
That's like the Lacrosse charger, too. I was skeptical when I bought mine that it could be THAT much better than any other charger, but boy was I wrong - it's great.
for the charger, I was considering one of the powerex smart chargers, or the La Crosse BC-700, any reccomendations there? I do like the fact that the La Crosse is coming in about $20 cheaper on Amazon, only thing is that is has 4 slots instead of 8, but that wouldn't be a selling point for me. I'm sure either one would be better than my generic duracell one hour charger.
as for the batteries, I definitely want something that is pre-charged, as of now I'm looking at the eneloops or the duracell pre-charged. I was wondering if anyone has any good or bad experience with these. the only thing I noticed is that the eneloops are 2000mah and the durcacells are I believe 2300mah..will that difference matter much?...by duracells now are 2700mah, but like i said, they drain way too fast. I use the canon external power pack and load 8 batteries into that, as well as 4 in the flash, so I would think 2000mah would be enough, but I'd like to get some other opinions
I have been using both the last-generation (~2200mAh) precharged Duracells and the 2000mAh precharged Eneloops and Sonys. I've no complaints yet for any of those brands, but I have observed that the Eneloops tend to be a bit better matched, capacity-wise. That says to me that the manufacturing process is better controlled and the quality control is a bit tighter. . . implying that the better matched cells will be more reliable.
I will reiterate that the precharged NiMH do exact a penalty (circa 30% slower) in recycle time over the older-technology, higher capacity cells. . . . they seem to have a higher internal resistance, which limits the amount of current you can pull, and tends to heat them up a bit more. The phenomenon seems to be constant across brands. That higher internal resistance makes me very leery of fast-charging them. . . as I think I mentioned in my previous post.
nb: I've been using the duracells mostly in household and low-risk service thus far, so I can't claim to have tortured them with really high-drain service. They seem to do well in LED flashlights and bicycle headlights, though.
so are you saying that the pre-charged are going to have a slower recycle rate? and that it's not a good idea to use a one hour charger?...if not, do you have a charger that you can recomend?....i would like these batteries and charger to be my last purchase for awhile
I just wanted to chime in and say that the batteries I have analyzed using the Maha MH-C9000 charger show that batteries are not "matched" from the factory. I have seen a big difference between cells from new packs and so far ran through about 48 cells, mostly Powerex 2700's, and Eneloops. I used to race rc cars and the matching you are referring to was companies testing each cell and matching them based upon discharge and mAh rates, which you can still do but there is no guarantee this is done before hand, nor is it indicated on a set of batteries.
I was actually thinking of doing this but honestly didn't see the need to match up a .2 volt or 200mAh difference. It's a good tip to know about batteries especially when you run a bad performing battery that can cause 3 others to have lower performance.
And the faster you charge a battery, the hotter it gets, and the faster it ages, losing both peak power output and charge capacity. If it gets sufficiently hot, it will either vent (more common with NiCd) or the separator will be damaged, both of which will have immediate and permanent negative effects on the battery's performance. Those negative effects are cumulative, so if you only heat it up "a little bit" each time, you're still going to see an effect over time.
The LaCrosse charger that others have linked to reviews very well; that would be a good choice. Any other charger that charges individual cells slowly is better than one that charges the whole load in parallel, which in turn is better than one that charges in series and at a high rate.
A good feature to look for is a charger that, at a minimum, shows the charge state of each cell as the charge cycle proceeds; the higher end chargers have some conditioning features built into them that are intended to eke a bit more life out of cells that have been in service for an extended number of cycles and are beginning to ail.
To be clear, then, from best to worst, here is how I would rank charging technologies:
BEST: variable rate (16) hour individual charger with monitors and conditioners.
4-8 hour individual charger with monitors (this is the commercial model I use for bulk charging on the road)
4 hour individual charger with 'done' lights (usually sold in a blister pack with batteries, usually comes as a wall-hanging unit)
1 hour individual charger with 'done' lights (likewise a blister-pack item)
Any parallel charger, no lights (also usually a wall-hanger, but either only one, or no 'done' light.
15 minute parallel charger with fan and single 'progress light' (I have one of these for emergency use. It can bake batteries if you're not careful.)
WORST: any series charger (you can tell this kind because it will only work with pairs or sets of four cells.)
As a final note: any NiMH that has been hot enough to damage the plastic wrap on the cell should be treated as suspect and only used for non-critical uses (like kid's toys) or recycled properly (best choice).
Regarding the matching out of the pack: I guess I made a bad assumption, as the RC packs were always sold as 'matched,' (though the really competitive guys would go through and test and re-match to make up 'super' packs. . . . they were the guys that would expect to place in any race they entered, and could be found traveling to national competitions.)
and the fact that batteries in a brand-name blister pack are almost always from the same lot, produced on automated equipment, should keep them well matched. it's distressing (but not, in retrospect, surprising) that that does not appear to be the case.
Now I want to go do some more involved testing on mine. . . (ugh. sometimes I hate being an engineer)
Edit: "individual charger" as used above is meant as a unit that has a separate charging circuit for each cell so that you can add and remove cells at any time without interrupting the rest. They come in capacities from 2 to 8 or more cells.
Yeah, I remember the Trinity matched packs with the printed specs for each cell. Not sure they still do that with the Li-po packs now. But it was really good to see high quality batteries come out like that.