How Long Before Recharge?

[Knoxximus]

I've heard that rechargebles lose life as they sit around. How long can they sit around fully charged before I should throw them back in the charger to "top them off"? Is there a hard and fast rule of thumb about this?

 

[donny662]

I think I remember reading they should be charged every month. I've also read it is good to fully discharge them before every charge, so I would suspect just "topping them off" in the charger isn't very good.

 

[paeryn]

They roughly drain 1% per day. If you've got a decent charger (i.e. one that detects when the battery is full, not the cheaper timer-based) then top them up if they've not been used for 2-3 of weeks.
Edit:
donny: NiCad suffered memory problems when charging partly emtpied, but NiMh don't.

 

[GeminiDomino]

They roughly drain 1% per day. If you've got a decent charger (i.e. one that detects when the battery is full, not the cheaper timer-based) then top them up if they've not been used for 2-3 of weeks.
Edit:
donny: NiCad suffered memory problems when charging partly emtpied, but NiMh don't.

If you don't have a good charger(like, you have one with a timer), DON'T TRY this.

Battery acid cleanup = !fun.

Rather than shell out boocoo bucks for a new charger, I just OC the GP2X, fire up some mp3s and leave it run until it dies, then charge.

 

[Vimacs]

dischargeing nimh is a bad idear, if you undercharge them they die.

 

[grahf]

I picked up a set of Eneloop batteries from a guy in japan. They are 2000mAh current max, but they last a damn long time for 2000mAh. They also do not discharge like current Ni-MH do. They discharge at a comparable rate to alkaline.

 

[sephiroth111]

i got a set (6 batteries) of 2.3k mAh Ni-Mh Panasonics for $11 at my job the other day. set one is still running strong at max charge after OCing my GP2x at 266mhz and playing some PCE games for about 3 hours or so.

i'm also running FW2.0. anyone know offhand how much the consumption dropped with Firmware2.0? It seems pretty good to me.

(btw, the GP2x has a web server...why would you need a web server on a portable device? it makes no sense to me, the FTP is understandable, and samba is very useful, but why HTTP?)

 

[Magnulus]

My NiMHs rarely have time to discharge even a full one percent by the 1%-day estimate. Not due to anything much besides heavy use. Train to work, lunch, train from work, while walking to and from the trainstation, on the toilet, in bed and to test things while I'm at my computer. Or any time at all I feel like playing Nethack, because that's how awesome Dzz's Nethack port is.

 

[PSyMastR]

i got a set (6 batteries) of 2.3k mAh Ni-Mh Panasonics for $11 at my job the other day. set one is still running strong at max charge after OCing my GP2x at 266mhz and playing some PCE games for about 3 hours or so.

i'm also running FW2.0. anyone know offhand how much the consumption dropped with Firmware2.0? It seems pretty good to me.

(btw, the GP2x has a web server...why would you need a web server on a portable device? it makes no sense to me, the FTP is understandable, and samba is very useful, but why HTTP?)

Beats me. Looks like they just wanted to fill up the yafs.

 

[sparr]

i got a set (6 batteries) of 2.3k mAh Ni-Mh Panasonics for $11 at my job the other day. set one is still running strong at max charge after OCing my GP2x at 266mhz and playing some PCE games for about 3 hours or so.

i'm also running FW2.0. anyone know offhand how much the consumption dropped with Firmware2.0? It seems pretty good to me.

(btw, the GP2x has a web server...why would you need a web server on a portable device? it makes no sense to me, the FTP is understandable, and samba is very useful, but why HTTP?)

Maybe you are going to use the gp2x as some sort of media device, and want to see what's playing over your home network?

The real question is... why not? If you really need the ~1MB that thttpd takes up then just delete it.