Charging NiMH Question
 

Hello.

I have this charger. I used it for the first time yesterday trying to charge a 7.2V 3000mAH NiMH battery. I chose to charge it as 2.5A.

What question is, the charger stated the battery as "FULL" while the "Present Level of Battery" on the LCD screen said ~ 1300 mAH. Shouldn't that show something close to 3000 mAH, which is the capacity of the battery?

After closer reading of the manual, I then ran into the option of setting the D Peak. When I checked, the "default" value was 5m/V Cell. However, the manual states that for NiMH, it should be 8m/V Cell. Other online searches yield various different numbers as well. Could the D Peak setting be too low be causing my battery to not fully charge or is something else wrong (most likely user error).

Does someone have this charger that can shed some insight?

Thanks in advance.

Could it be that the battery only needed 1300mah and that this topped up the pack to the full 3000mah level.

This could be it. If so, then the "present level of battery" number on the screen is misleading and it's really showing how much the battery was charged and not the capacity of the battery. That is confusing.

Steve is correct, It just all it needed. NiMh are different animal of batteries, Lipo's can be charged anytime. NiMh they do better when discharge less then 1v. NiMh do not have memory like the NiCd's.

Ok, got it.

What about the D peak? What should that be set at?

There is also something called a false peak. When the charger stops and the battery is cold, just restart the charger.

The Delta rate(mv) is different with every charger. It's all about trials. Start with 3mv per-cell(3mv / c) and do a test run for run-time.

I have the MRC Super Brain 977 and Graupner Polaron 1400. They all can peak-charge the batteries at/with a different mv rate.

Thank you all for your help. Much appreciated.