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Posts Tagged ‘NiMH battery’
The 1.2V AA 3000 mAh VTEC Ultra Capacity 2 NiMH batteries are being distributed by LRP and NOSRAM, popular names in the remote control models and are supposed to be of high quality and true to specs. So if these guys say that the batteries from their VTEC brand are supposed to offer a given capacity you are expecting them not only to meet it, but also exceed it. Now, these VTEC batteries are being sold as 3000 mAh capacity (clearly written on LRP and NOSRAM websites), though on the batteries themselves only 3000 is written and not a single rating mentioning capacity in mAh. Anyway, let us see if these batteries are able to offer the performance they are supposed to or not…
Starting our test of the 1.2V AA 3000 mAh VTEC Ultra Capacity 2 NiMH batteries as we normally do with a low constant current discharge rate of 0.2A and the result we got was just 2178 mAh as capacity. As we’ve already mentioned the VTEC brand by LRP/NOSRAM is supposed to be offering high quality products that do not come at a very affordable prices, so we repeated the test multiple times with different batteries, but the result was pretty much the same. And we are sure these are not some fake Chinese batteries branded as VTEC as we got them form an official distributor of NOSRAM. Getting less than 800 mAh capacity at lower discharge rate than the supposed capacity is a real disappointment, we really expected a much better result. Even if we take into account that the higher the capacity of NiMH batteries goes the faster they self-discharge in the first day after being fully charged, loosing so much in terms of capacity is just a few hours is way too much to be considered an option. And while the performance remains good when increasing the constant current discharge rate at up to 2.0A in our tests, these batteries clearly should’ve been labeled as 2200 mAh and not as 3000 mAh. Again, these VTEC batteries have shown us really unsatisfactory performance and have disappointed us quite a lot, so there is no way we would recommend them as there are much better alternatives.
The performance of the 1.2V AA 3000 mAh VTEC Ultra Capacity 2 NiMH Batteries in our tests:
– 2178 mAh at 0.2A load
– 1967 mAh at 0.5A load
– 1839 mAh at 1.0A load
– 1805 mAh at 2.0A load
– 2.729 Wh at 0.2A load
– 2.407 Wh at 0.5A load
– 2.179 Wh at 1.0A load
– 1.938 Wh at 2.0A load
The 1.2V AA 2500 mAh GP Rechargeable NiMH batteries are supposedly from the higher capacity rechargeable models from GP and we had high expectations when we started testing them. They are rated at 2500 mAh typical and 2450 mAh minimal capacity, though our test results show a bit different picture and in order to avoid a possible mistake we even repeated the tests 3 times and got pretty much the same results. So take a look below to see what you can expect from these NiMH batteries from GP. We’ve already seen that different GP models can provide different results and apparently not all models are as good as you could expect them to be.
We have started the test of the 1.2V AA 2500 mAh GP Rechargeable NiMH batteries as we normally do with a low constant current discharge rate of 0.2A and the result we got was 2223 mAh as capacity and that is a bit of a disappointment. With more than 12% less than the advertised capacity and with repeating the tests multiple times just to be sure we are a bit disappointed, though the batteries did manage well at 0.5A and 1.0A, the results at high load with 2.0A were also disappointing. Hopefully the even higher capacity GP NiMH batteries will be able to provide better results than what we’ve got from these.
The performance of the 1.2V AA 2500 mAh GP Rechargeable NiMH Batteries in our tests:
– 2223 mAh at 0.2A load
– 2037 mAh at 0.5A load
– 1808 mAh at 1.0A load
– 66 mAh at 2.0A load
– 2.769 Wh at 0.2A load
– 2.388 Wh at 0.5A load
– 1.987 Wh at 1.0A load
– 0.068 Wh at 2.0A load
The 1.2V AA 2300 mAh Maxell Rechargeable NiMH batteries we got for testing here are rated as 2300 mAh minimum capacity and that is the number printed on their package and this kind of surprised us as usually NiMH battery manufacturers print with big numbers on the front the typical capacity and somewhere else with small letters the minimum capacity that their cells should provide. The 2300 NiMHs we’ve got for testing apparently are now being replaced with a newer model that offers 2500 mAh capacity, though as it was not yet available in the shop we got these from we got only the 2300 mAh version.
We have started the test of the 1.2V AA 2300 mAh Maxell Rechargeable NiMH batteries with a low constant current discharge rate of 0.2A (the lowest load for AA NiMHs in our tests) and the result we got was 2328 mAh capacity. This value is well within the minimum capacity rating for the batteries, so we can say these Maxell NiMHs perform very well and furthermore increasing the load to 0.5A and 1.0A the batteries not only manage to still provide very good level of capacity, but the difference is actually quite small between the two and even at 2.0A load we still get good capacity. So the 1.2V AA 2300 mAh Maxell Rechargeable NiMH batteries do manage to perform very well not only in lower load applications, but in a very high ones as well by providing good capacity in various applications requiring more power.
The performance of the 1.2V AA 2300 mAh Maxell Rechargeable NiMH Batteries in our tests:
– 2328 mAh at 0.2A load
– 2182 mAh at 0.5A load
– 2156 mAh at 1.0A load
– 1547 mAh at 2.0A load
– 2.902 Wh at 0.2A load
– 2.640 Wh at 0.5A load
– 2.469 Wh at 1.0A load
– 1.598 Wh at 2.0A load