Battery Question
 

OK--so batteries and electronics are not my strong suite so I am a simple question.

Do NiMH batteries need to be discharged in order to get peak preformance?

this is a question that is debated a little. most people will probably tell you yes, you need to discharge because nickel batteries form a memory. however I've also been told that nimh are different than nicd and aren't as seceptible to the memory type problems of the nicd. My 5400 7 cell nihm battery works really well and I just make sure I run my truck to the point where it won't move any more before I charge the battery (and after proper cool down). Now I wouldn't consider that discharging completely, but I suppose it's more of a discharge than if you charged the battery as soon as you noticed your truck was starting to slow down a little bit.

Everybody has their own theory about how to maintain batteries, and apparently all of them are wrong because I hear a new one about every two weeks :rolleyes:. For my NiMH packs, I'll just recharge them between races. I don't discharge them until the following week the night before I go racing again, when I'll hook them to a lightbulb rack followed by the tray. Once all the lights on the tray go out, I charge them back up and they're ready to go tomorrow.

If they're going to sit more than a couple weeks (or in my case all summer while I race the gas truck), I'll go through with the lightbulb & tray process, then only give them half a charge. When I pull them back out, it's back on the dischargers, then one or two cycles of fully charging (but at a lower than usual amperage) followed by discharging.

Like I said, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the next post after this is someone saying "OMG that's gonna junk those cells if you're doing it that way!!!", but at this point I really don't care. I have my method, it works for me. I DO know for sure you don't ever want to take a battery down to nothing, either by running it until the truck stops or using dischargers with no voltage cutoffs.