Restoring old battery packs

[zBigBadWolf]

My packs have been sitting for so long, many of them won't take a charge. Even my beautiful Ballistic 3000 matched packs won't take more than a 5% charge. I've tried everything short of voodoo.

Things I have tried:
-Low .1amp charge/discharge cycles
-5amp burst charges
-Freezing them
-Hooking them to a 8v 300 mah D/C converter overnight

The NiCads seem to come back better than the NiHMs which, from what I have read, is standard.

Anyone have any tricks I haven't tried?

 

[ik632]

I had some old NiMH packs that I had to hook up to an old school trickle charger I had and let them trickle over night. I think I had some 2000mah packs and the charger was 50ma so that's technically about 40 hours for a full charge. You'll want to trickle them for a while and then drain them fully and do it again. I'd try a slightly lower charge rate than the 300ma you already did.

This only works for NiCD and NiMH, never do that with LiPO!!

 

[allgm1]

I've played around with old batteries in the past (I'm a broke mofo and a cheapskate) and I'll be honest with you. Don't waste your time with them, if they aren't charging good from the get-go then they probably will dump shortly after to get ready to use them. Battery pack prices are really stpid low, spend a few bucks and get your self some new packs.

 

[zBigBadWolf]

I've had 2 chargers going for the last week trying to work some life into these. I've probably spent more in electricity than the cost of buying new packs.

I found a 100mah adapter and have one battery on it for the night. If it doesn't work, guess I'll pry open my wallet.

 

[obebaldone1]

I shot my last bad pack with a 357 :mrgreen: that worked good after I got some new ones. (Side note 3s will stop a 38 )