It’s come to my attention that next month (just a few days away) will mark my 2nd year blogging regularly. I’ve surprised myself by managing to keep it up, and I hope to continue to do so. You might have noticed I only blog once a month or so. It’s not that I don’t want to blog more, it’s just that the topics to blog about don’t seem to come up! So if you find my blogs interesting, do stick around, maybe comment if you find it interesting. The RSS feed is the best way for you to keep track of new posts. You can access it with the orange icon in the top left.

I got back from camping yesterday, and what a week it’s been. We went back to Shell Island this year as we really enjoyed it last year. Unfortunately we didn’t get to go on the beach much last year as the weather was awful compared to this trip. There was still wind and rain but in between we got serious amounts of sun so we were able to get to the beach a fair bit this year! Some days it was so hot that on one of them I managed to get sun burned in just a couple of hours even with SPF30 cream on! The rain we got was a cracking amount too… If I were to guess it looked like a full days worth of rain fell in 20 minutes. It went from totally bone dry to a sodden puddle laden field in just 20 minutes. I have never witnessed rain that heavy before.

The rain was so bad that 2 of us had to move our tents because a few inches of water had settled underneath! My tent is a few years old now so it’s not as waterproof as it once was. That showed during this rain because it leaked from every possible place it could. Even after moving it the rain was still coming through on light showers so I had to put a spare tarpaulin over the main sleeping area to keep it dry. Thankfully the underside wasn’t leaking as much. I’m still going to get myself a new tent though as it is about time it was replaced.

Getting onto the island was fun this year too. When I arrived (on my own this time but meeting up with others, many of us arrived at different times this year), I was stopped in my tracks at the last 500 yards by the tide. For those who don’t know, the island is not an island as such but it is tidal. Some days the tide covers the road by about 1-2ft making it dangerous to cross by car. I knew it was going to be covered but wasn’t sure how much. Anyway I waited in line for about 45 minutes before I was able to get across. I didn’t want to go through the salty water, but everyone else was doing it and I would have held up the line if I didn’t move along! Thankfully it wasn’t a lot and the excessive rain we had some days cleaned off most if not all of the salt.

As repeated every year, my power supply box was once again a center of attention and use by everybody on the trip. One of the guys met a friend on the site and even showed it to him, and he was also impressed. This year not only were phones were charged and Nintendo DS’s charged, even some portable speakers which give much better sound quality than a phone needed a charge too. This year however was different in one more way. Unlike previous years, this time I took along a small solar panel. The last time I did this was in 2006 when I took my jump start pack, CCFL and 2×1.5w solar panels. The panel I took this year was a small 10w panel I got off ebay for £20. 10w doesn’t sound like much (and in reality it’s not) but it was enough to prevent the battery going too low.

Last year the power box was so dead that the LED voltmeter didn’t even register a single light. This year, we returned home with 60-70% showing on the box and that was even with much more use of the power inverter compared to other years. I’d call that a big success. I don’t know how much power was generated or used but clearly it was quite a lot over the course of the week. Next year I will have a new setup for the box which will incorporate a digital meter run off of an Arduino along with current sensors (hopefully) which will be able to tell me how much power I have generated and how much I have used. I do need to do some more testing and experimenting with these however. The blog will be kept up to date on developments with this.

Next year I hope to have a 20w panel, a smaller battery (to save weight), the new circuit based on the Arduino, more powerful USB sockets and more of them in general, an integrated and hard-wired inverter with a socket on the front and perhaps more. It’s a big project but it’s keeping my basic electronics hobby happy.

Anyway, until next time…

That’s right, a phone that I have managed to keep for more than a couple of months! And guess how many times it has crashed? Dozens I hear you say? Nope. None. Not a single crash since I got this phone. Sure, apps have crashed. We all know that the Facebook app has it’s flaws, as do some others, but nothing that is stock on the phone has ever crashed on me. That’s more than can be said for my old phones, the LG GTT540 and the Optimus 2x which not only crashed frequently but they also refused to hold a data/wifi/cell connection for longer than a day.

The battery life is also great. Both of my Android phones struggled to get a day if used “normally”. The iPhone easily makes it through the day of normal use. If I use my running/biking app then it gets a bit of a hammering but otherwise it’s perfectly reasonable.

If and when it comes to the point where I need a new phone, I’d have to think long and hard about going back to Android. After a full year using iOS (with frequent updates I might add), I don’t think I could go back to any phone that I know has the possibility to go wrong because of lack of care by the manufacturer. If I were to go back to Android, I would only go for a high end one such as a Samsung Galaxy because they use stock Android and none of the manufacturer bloated crap.

The big question is though, would I buy another iPhone? Yes, I would. Even at £500 up front.

After getting a new HP Micro Server I decided it was time to stop using a desktop OS (Windows 7) and move to a proper server OS (Windows Server 2008 R2). It’s a good move in many respects, but the most important is that it’s designed to be a server and run 24/7 where as a desktop OS isn’t.

Everything went smoothly until I got to setting up my CCTV software. I use a regular cheapo webcam for my CCTV needs. It’s simple but it does the job. On Windows 7 this worked great with the exception of USB webcams causing crashes on occasion. The problem I encountered was that the webcam simply didn’t work at all. The driver had been installed, and I even tried a webcam that was driverless (using built in Windows drivers). That also didn’t work. All I was getting was a black screen.

What also struck me as odd is that one of my webcam applications wouldn’t run. Windows 2008 R2 is based on Windows 7, so the application should run without a problem unless an artificial restriction has been put in place. I knew it hadn’t as my friend made the software himself and confirmed it. He suggested it was just a “general incompatibility”.

Regardless, I tried another piece of his software that also dealt with webcams but this also had problems running. However in this case I got a different error message about “wmvcore.dll”. I decided to do a quick search for solutions by copying the error message, and it came up with something I didn’t know about. Windows Server 2008 R2 doesn’t come with the “desktop experience” package installed. This is installed on Windows 7 by default of course, but a server doesn’t require it because it’s not a desktop OS. Part of the desktop experience is Windows Media Player, and this is what the error was referring to. I decided it was a long shot but I installed the desktop experience package.

Low and behold, after it installed (and the system rebooted twice) the webcams were now working! Hurray! It was a simple fix but had I not been able to try the 2nd application I would probably not have found the solution without it’s error message.

So now I’m happy that it’s working. What I’m not happy about is that compared to my old server, this one is a little less powerful so it’s using more of the CPU to run the CCTV software (75-85% rather than 50% or so) but that’s not a huge issue. I’ll monitor it and make sure it’s not affecting backups etc.

I hope this long winded article helps someone else with the same issue I’ve been having.

Just a quick note before I begin, the Peugeot 306 I mentioned in my last post was sold last week. I managed to make back what I paid for it so it was no loss for me at all besides the time and worry spent over it. Still, you live and learn from your mistakes. There is one thing I have to note however. I sold the car through Auto Trader, and as soon as I signed up, less than a few hours later I had interest in the car. This was great, but then you read the e-mail and realise it was a scam. I got 2 e-mails both sounding very similar; A person needs a car for their son/daughter, but they are going away for 6 weeks and can’t view it. They will send payment via PayPal and they’ll pay the costs, and have a ‘shipper’ collect the car once payment is made. It all sounds perfect. What people don’t always realise is that they will then open a Paypal complaint and claim their money back, and there is little you can do to stop it. Auto Trader recommend you ignore these types of e-mails. I actually edited my advert to say phone calls only and cash on collection, as the scammers won’t call you or deliver the cash, so they ignore the ad.

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The (incomplete) circuit for the powerbox v2. Left: Arduino. Right: 2x 5v @ 3A Switched Mode PSU’s.

Right, onto something more interesting. I decided earlier in the year to make version 2 of my power box (v3 if you include it just being a box). This one will be updated to include a digital voltmeter based on the Arduino. This also allows me to put in various other things on the screen too such as current draw, solar charge current, temperature, etc. I’m also upgrading the USB sockets from an LM2575 to the LM2576 which is a jump from 1A to 3A output. I’ve decided to split the 3A between 2 USB ports (perhaps 3, I don’t know yet, most likely 2 though) so that it can handle tablet PC’s and more modern phones. Some tablets won’t charge unless they get at least 1.5-2A of power and you never know, someone might want to charge one.

I’m also going to wire up the inverter to a proper socket this time and have a power switch on the front so you don’t have to mess about with opening the box to use it. This was a massive pain and had the risk of it being wired up incorrectly too.

The biggest change however is that I now have a 10w solar panel to charge the battery when we’re away. It is small enough to fit in the box but powerful enough to offset the use of the battery. It won’t fully charge it if we’re using it, but it will help stop it going flat as quickly. Last year we flattened it in the week (it was as dead as dead gets the day we left). This damages the battery if you do this so I would prefer to keep it topped up by use of solar. Here is a bit of maths…

The battery is 90Ah (so you can draw 1A for 90 hours until it’s dead, theoretically).

The solar panel, on a good day will output 3Ah (0.6A x 5 hours good sunlight) which is about 36Wh, plus perhaps a bit more when it’s indirectly in sunlight. I intend to roughly calculate this with the arduino’s solar input current.

Assuming a phone battery is 5Wh, I can charge roughly 6 phones per day from solar alone without using any battery power. This is assuming the solar panel does output 0.6A for a minimum of 5 hours and the system is 100% efficient.

Of course, it’s never perfect and when you want solar power the sun goes in, so these figures will likely never be reached. I won’t know for sure until it’s tried out for real.

Regardless, it’s better than having no solar panel at all. Over the course of the week, I could put 20Ah of power into the battery from the solar alone, and if we use what we used last year then it’s a win win situation. I do of course have use of the car if it does go flat. A 15-30 minute blast on the jump cables will sort it out no problem.

Anyway, I’ve been ordering parts for the project this evening so I can hopefully get it completed before camping this year. If not, I still have the old faithful box from last year instead which works just great. I’ll keep the blog updated with developments on this as I go along.

Bear with me, this is going to be a wordy post…

After my whole issue with the Passat over the last 14 months, enough was enough and it was time to start looking for something else. There is lots to think about when looking for a new car, and one of the biggest is your budget. Part of the problem for me is that the Passat isn’t paid off yet, I still have over £1200 to pay on it. That said, I could pay it off any time, but of course that then immediately leaves me with that amount less in my bank account.

Remaining payments aside, I had to work out how much I could reasonably spend without looking into a new finance deal. This figure came out pretty small. After paying off the Passat. which I have to do before I can sell/part exchange it, I would be left with about £1000 to spend on a car, plus the (likely) £2000 the Passat is worth, so call it £3000. To get something decent for that would be a struggle.

Originally I was looking at a Ford Focus 1.6TDCi, 2010. It was £8000 or so. It’s a nice car, but after a test drive I wasn’t so sure if I liked the engine as it seemed a bit under powered. For that reason I hesitated and needed to put more thought into it. A few days later I suddenly thought to myself, “why am I thinking of spending so much money on a car?”. It’s a good question. Is it really worth spending that much on a car? I decided it probably wasn’t so that idea got scrapped pretty quickly.

So what now? I set about looking at what I could get reasonably. The first car to spring to mind was something I had owned before, a Peugeot 306. I knew them well, I knew they were reliable and not particularly uncomfortable (I’ll get back to this bit). I had a look on Auto Trader and there were a few to look at. I made some phone calls the next day and managed to arrange to go and look at one.

It was a 2001 306 HDi, the electronic version of the engine. Surely a big mistake but when I got there it wasn’t an opportunity I could dismiss. It was £900, a bargain really considering its condition. I snapped it up on the spot and the next day I picked it up. It needed a little TLC in the form of one new tyre and the injector lines needed tightening, but besides that it was in good shape. I couldn’t get those fixed until the weekend so I kept driving the Passat.

It took a few days to get the injectors right and in that time I drove it a fair number of miles. Every time I drove it I just kept thinking “I don’t like this”. It took me a while to figure out what it was, but I realised that I missed the luxury of the Passat. In comparison the Passat is a dream to drive. It’s smooth, comfortable, quiet, doesn’t rattle or squeak, etc (even if it is unreliable). I mentioned it to my friends and one replied saying it’s because I had driven a cruising car and I would find it very hard to go back. He was dead right. I just couldn’t see myself going back to a smaller more uncomfortable car, even though I’d owned the same car twice before.

What have I done with the 306 then? Nothing. It’s fixed, but it’s just sat outside the house not getting used, so I’ve offered it to my Mum to drive while I wait for the V5 document to arrive so I can sell it, but that’s a few weeks away. It’s not a big loss though. I’ve spent £35 on it since I got it on a tyre and fuel. Fixing the injectors was free besides the time. I will easily be able to make my money back as they are still fairly popular cars if the guy I bought it off is anything to go by. He said the phone never stopped ringing for viewings when he was trying to sell it.

So this outlines how hard it is to find a car. No wait, it’s easy to find a car, but it’s not easy to settle on one. Some people won’t care about some of the things I have as at the end of the day, it drives – it gets you from A to B, and hopefully back to A when you’re done. But I couldn’t get used to it. I still don’t know if it’s just the comfort I missed or if it was something else as well. All I know is that it’s not the right replacement to the Passat and I need to keep looking.

What do I get? That’s the big one playing on my mind, simply because every car has it’s own set of faults. There isn’t a single car in existence that doesn’t have problems and that makes it a difficult choice. I decided 6+ months ago I would never touch another VW, or anything by the VAG group (VW, Audi, Skoda) ever again – first impressions and all (VW didn’t do much to help me either). I’ve thought about Ford considering lots of people in the family have owned Fords without a problem. I’ve also thought Peugeot, but newer than the 306. One friend keeps trying to get me to go Volvo, but again I just don’t know. At the end of the day I think it’s going to be a “choose something you like, look up it’s faults and deal with it” situation. Time will tell, but for now I am keeping the Passat but I don’t know how long for.

A few weeks ago I attended the Silverstone 6 hour WEC (World Endurance Championship). I was sort of forced into it by my friend Ben, but in the end I actually really enjoyed it. Apart from it being an opportunity to go camping and hang out with friends, it also gave me the opportunity to do some photography too.

I’m still a newbie when it comes to photography, I will admit this freely. I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated a good photograph but it’s always hard to produce the same quality of photo yourself. This proved virtually impossible until I got myself a DSLR camera (Nikon D3100 entry level DSLR).

Even when I first got the camera 6 months ago, just as a point and shoot camera the quality difference is amazing. The images come out very crisp and very vibrant in comparison so a point and shoot camera. I had seen pictures that came from the iPhone before and they were impressive, but once I saw DSLR images there was no way I could ever go back to a point and shoot. That said, I do use my iPhone on regular basis for quick snaps where quality isn’t needed.

Around the track I saw all the more experienced photographers and even the pros using huge telephoto lenses, likely 300mm or more. I knew that’s what I need to get hold of, but there is no way I could have done it that weekend. I made do with what I had anyway and managed to get a couple of really good shots.

Anyway, back to Silverstone. I have never been to one of these events so it was completely new to me. I just sort of went all sheepish and followed everyone else (most had been before). Photo opportunities were quite frequent and I took them all, even if the outcome was disappointing. On the first day my first couple of photos impressed me, but as the day went on I realised that they weren’t what I wanted them to be. The biggest problem I had was lack of zoom on the camera lens. I was using the stock lens which although had zoom, was only to 55mm (quite pitiful for this event).

This trip, aside from the cold, wind, rain, sun burn (yep, even through the cloud and rain!), inability to sleep and the hugely expensive price on everything at the track, it was a fantastic weekend and something I will definitely do again.

On the whole, I took over 600 photos. Some were OK, some weren’t, but I did take them all in RAW format so I can process them better later if I want to.

Realising that I needed a better lens I was randomly looking at them with my friend John. He has the same camera (I bought one after I tried his out) so we were looking at lenses for each other too. He found a nice 300mm lens for a respectable ~£180, so he bought one on the good reviews it was given. A week later I tried his out and couldn’t resist getting one myself. I’m yet to try it out properly as there have been no events to get out to use it, but I will soon as I will need the practice!

My next major planned event is actually camping in a couple of months but I hope I get chance to try it out before then. Ben keeps trying to persuade me to go to Le Mans 24 hours but I have no passport and I won’t get one in time for the event. I said I’d consider it next year!

Until then, I have plenty of time for practice and time to gain experience. No doubt I will need it to get that perfect shot. There is still a lot I need to learn despite doing photography at college. A lot of that knowledge has drained away when I’ve not used it. I do have friends to help me out and they’ve done a great job so far. You know who you are!

I finally got the response from the finance ombudsman earlier today and it was not the news I was hoping for. They rejected the claim on several grounds, including the car’s age, the mileage at purchase and he said he was satisfied reported issues had been sufficiently fixed…

 

How he could possibly come to this conclusion I will likely never know. There is no point in me appealing as he already has all of the information I can possibly give towards the case.

So here I am now, stuck with a car that is broken, is going to cost me potentially thousands to fix when the clutch and gearbox finally go, and I still have £1,700 to pay on the finance. Selling the car will only get me back about £2,000 part exchange if I’m lucky – so in essence I’ve lost at least £3000 on this piece of crap car.

I thought from the beginning I was at least in with a chance with the finance ombudsman given that they are the governing body for finance, and they are government operated meaning it’s not in their interest to “fix” the outcome of the case. I would have thought they’d be a little more forthcoming especially given all of the evidence supplied. Apparently not.

My advice to everyone is research your future car and be absolutely sure you want to buy it knowing it’s common faults etc before you commit. This is exactly what I will be doing for my next car.

You live and learn.

If you read my last blog about my UPS battery woes and it interested you, then this one might help you further.

Batteries are a horrible technology in many respects. They’re expensive, damaging to the environment and incredibly inefficient. Unfortunately we have nothing better so we have to make do until another technology is found.

When it comes to large batteries, you’ll generally only find one type of battery – lead acid. They come in several forms:

1. FLA (Flooded Lead Acid) – The type found in cars
2. AGM (Absorbed Glass Mat) – The type found in UPS’s and alarm systems
3. SLA (Sealed Lead Acid, commonly mislabeled and are really AGM) – Also found in UPS’s and alarm systems

 

While not the best at energy storage compared to Lithium Ion/Polymer, they are much cheaper and store close to the same amount of energy too.

Taking care of these batteries is important (as with any battery actually) because of the way in which they work.

A lead acid battery is comprised of lead plates and an electrolyte solution of sulfuric acid. This is how the battery holds it’s energy. During normal use, the energy will be released and stored via a chemical reaction. This reaction heats the electrolyte and over time this solution evaporates. If this happens too much and the lead plates become exposed and/or dry, the capacity of the battery will drop. Generally “going dry” is what kills a lot of mis-used batteries.

But this isn’t all, there is also another process called “sulphation”. This occurs when the battery is discharged and sulphur builds up on the lead plates. This inhibits it’s ability to hold and release energy. This also kills batteries when mis-used, especially when left discharged. This is common in cars and other vehicles, especially in winter when the battery is put under more strain.

Battery Charging

Now the problem I had was mainly the cells going dry through what is known as “float charging”. This is when the battery is held at a voltage above it’s natural storage voltage to keep the charge level at 100%. This is constantly putting some energy into the battery so it warms up, and the electrolyte dries off. This is what killed my UPS batteries, because the UPS was in essence over-charging the battery.

How can this be avoided? Don’t keep it on float of course, or if you do, do it at a reduced voltage. My Belkin UPS’s keep a float charge of about 13.3-13.6v. A standard 12v battery will sit at about 12.8-13.3v when fully charged, so if you can keep it around that voltage, you should extend the life of the battery. However, if you don’t bring a 12v battery up to 14.0-14.5v when charging, it will never fully charge and so you will end up sulphating the plates quicker. It’s a tricky situation, but it can be avoided.
The answer is 2 or 3 stage charging. 3 stage charging involves:

1. Bulk phase – Charging the battery at a constant current (generally 10-30% of the battery capacity, referred to as “C”). For example,   10Ah battery holds 10,000mAh of capacity, so you would charge it at 1000-3000mA or 1-3A.
2. Absorption phase – Charging the battery at constant voltage (typically 14.0-14.5v for a 12v battery) until the current drops to about 1% of C. For a 10Ah battery this would be 100mA or 0.1A.
3. Trickle phase – Holding the battery at a reduced constant voltage (the tricky part is what voltage to use here).

 

Image Credit: http://www.infinitumstore.my/2009/07/3-stage-charging-process/

 2 stage charging is the same as above but without the trickle charge phase.

My Belkin UPS appears to do 3 stage charging, and it’s trickle voltage is around 13.3-13.6v. The difference with mine is it’s not constant voltage but rather it pulses on and off. Pulsing has been tested but there is no definitive proof it helps over the long run.

The better way to do this would be to do 2 stage charging, then cut off the charging completely until the voltage drops below a set level. Then you begin the process over again. This is the better way as it lets the battery rest with full capacity, without charging to make the electrolyte evaporate off.

I don’t know why more systems don’t do this. I imagine it’s for simplicity in design, otherwise they would need to incorporate a fully battery monitoring system which would cost more money. Who knows, but it makes sense to cut it off after it’s charged. This is especially important for lithium batteries like those in mobile phones. If you over-charge these (continue to charge when full), they can explode! So why do it with lead acids of any kind?

What about discharging?

Now that you know about charging, what about safe discharge levels? This is one that has plagued many people. Generally voltage would be used, wouldn’t you think? Well no, because lead acid batteries charge/discharge level cannot be determined without use of a hydrometer. This is a device that you use to sample the electrolyte from the battery and uses floats to determine the “specific gravity” of the electrolyte. I won’t go into how this works, but it’s something you can only do manually. Voltage on any battery is not a charge level indicator, you can only use it as a dummy guide and it will often fail you.

That said, you should be aware of safe limits that lead acid batteries work to. Here is a handy table to explain it to you.

As a general rule, the battery should never be discharged past 12v when “resting”. Resting means it has been sat for more than 4 hours with zero load connected to it. With a load connected, you should never discharge below 10.5v. If you continue to discharge it, you risk warping the lead plates, and doing so can create a short circuit which will ruin your battery.This is a very basic table of charge level based on voltage and what the specific gravity is expected to be. Going in the standard good to bad colours, you can see that the battery capacity is only good above 50%. This is because below this, sulphation occurs much more quickly. On a totally flat battery this can be as quickly as a day or two.

You should also ALWAYS charge a lead acid battery after it has been used. Even if it was just a few percent, because any discharge speeds up plate sulphation.

This is something I didn’t take into account when building my camping power box. My LED volt meter range goes from 10.7v to 12.5v when really it should have been 12.0 to 12.6v. However, that said, now that I know it’s wrong I can use my own knowledge to determine when to stop using it and recharge it. The added range allows me to see when it’s time to stop using it under load as well.

Hopefully you have learned something from this and it’s a reminder for me if nothing else.

For those of you who don’t know what a UPS is, it’s an uninterruptable power supply, or “battery backup” for your PC/servers and other electrical items which takes over when the mains fails. I have a couple of them, one for my PC, one for my server and one for my network equipment.

Recently, the batteries in one of those UPS’s decided they didn’t want to play anymore and suffered catastrophic failure. This meant that the UPS would no longer hold if the mains power dropped. Typically the batteries should last about 3-5 years but these only lasted a tad over 2 years. I was disappointed but then I began reading why this varies between UPS’s.

I have 2 UPS’s on my desktop PC. One for the monitors and one
for the PC itself. I have it this way because my PC is fairly high end so it can reach a fairly high power usage when being used heavily. A single UPS for all of this was unlikely to hold very long. These UPS’s are about 5 years old and still had their original batteries. I had known for some time these were getting poor but it wasn’t until now I decided to replace them with new ones. I have retired the UPS that had batteries die recently and took the monitors UPS and put that on my server instead. The remaining UPS for my PC now holds one of my monitors and the PC only.

I began to think why these batteries lasted 5 years and still had life in them but these others lasted just 2. I discovered that the “float” voltage, the voltage that the battery is held at once fully charged was likely too high on the UPS that recently died. It tended to hold it at 13.8v. A fully charged 12v battery sits at about 12.8-13.3v. These other UPS’s seem to pulse the power into the battery at around 13.3-13.6v rather than holding it at 13.8v. This is likely the explanation to their longer life, so it makes sense to stop using the other one and use these instead.

This discovered I decided to buy 2 new batteries, one for each UPS. I did my best to select the best brand I could because I read that they tend to last longer as well. However when these batteries arrived they were not the brand I had thought I ordered. Despite this I tried them in my UPS’s anyway and immediately had a problem.

Firstly, I checked the weight of them against the old ones. They were 0.5KG lighter which suggests a lower lead density and thus a lower energy density as well. This was worrying because I opted for the “best brand” available.

Although when I got the batteries they were not fully charged, I would have expected them to put out enough power to at least keep the PC’s online and/or boot them up. During testing they would switch to batteries just fine, but they would not start the PC from cold (powered off). This isn’t how a UPS is supposed to work, it should work both ways. During testing these batteries reached 2 minutes of sustained run time before encountering a low battery condition and shutting off. This wasn’t acceptable. The original batteries would have held the load for at least 10-15 minutes!ble. Despite that I carried on with testing.

Unhappy with this I thought I’d let them charge for 24-48 hours and see how that goes. I then tried the test again and managed around the same sustained run time. I contacted the seller on eBay that I got them from and explained I wasn’t happy. He replied saying that they are likely being trickle charged and it could take up to 3-4 days to fully charge them. The specs say 8 hours to fully charge, but they could be wrong. He assured me they were the one of the best brands and suggested I try them again in 3-4 days. He also said the weight difference should offer little difference to their output.

3-4 days later I tried another test and managed 12 and 14 minutes between them. This was significantly better but not quite what I expected. I contacted the seller again who said it might take a couple of charge/discharge cycles to get them to 100%. I agreed as batteries do sometimes need this cycling so I said I would try again in a few more days. It’s only been 2 so I haven’t tested them yet, but I am hopeful that they will be slightly better again.

All in all it’s been a bit of a pain but it was also a learning curve involving a fair amount of research. This leads me on to my next blog about battery knowledge, as I have learned a few things I didn’t know about how to care for batteries recently.