Nicad and nimh

[Dorkhedeos]

do you think charging a nimh battery with a cg-25a hitec charger would have any negative effects? Anybody know if the cg25 is a smart charger or is it just on a timer? I tried emailing hitec, but they never responded

 

[dannyual767]

I finally found your charger on Tower's website. It looks like a simple, low output nicad charger that works great for charging nimh batteries. I use one that came with my wife's Tower Hobbies (Futaba) 6-ch airplane radio. I just plug it into my Airtronics MX-3S TX and RX packs and charge overnight.

The key is low charge rate. Nimh do just fine with a slow charge nicad charger.

Here is a quick thread I found via Google:

RC Groups

 

[Dorkhedeos]

The thing that makes me worried is that the charger might be on a timer instead of sensing when the battery is fully charged. If it is on a timer, it will either overcharge it, or never reach its full charge, and i want to avoid both of those.

 

[Eric Bourlet]

That is a trickle charger. It does not use a timer or peak detection. If you buy a peak charger you need to get one designed for NiMh as a NiCd charger uses a Negative Delta rather than a Zero Delta that the NiMh require. You can use a NiMh Zero delta charger on a NiCd the worst thing that would happen is it would false peak and you would not get a full charge but you should never use a NiCd Peak charger on a NiMh as there is a good chance it will not detect the peak and will over charge and damage the cells.