Li-ion Batteries - Care Of

[sight-pin]

Bit different i know but i have a LiPo battery i used with a model helicopter which i over used on one flight, it just expanded in size (very unnerving).
Sold the heli but I'm now left with a battery i don't know what to do with TBH, It's been placed in a metal cashbox in the garden for about a year for safety, i know if i puncture the thin plastic case it will catch fire. Any ideas how to dispose of it?

 

[Bazzer]

Bit different i know but i have a LiPo battery i used with a model helicopter which i over used on one flight, it just expanded in size (very unnerving).
Sold the heli but I'm now left with a battery i don't know what to do with TBH, It's been placed in a metal cashbox in the garden for about a year for safety, i know if i puncture the thin plastic case it will catch fire. Any ideas how to dispose of it?

Local authority recycling?
Certainly the one local to me has a specific battery disposal section, subdivided into car batteries and others.

 

[JhnBssll]

Li-ion cells are pretty rugged despite the horror stories. I don't profess to be an expert on them but I have more than a basic knowledge since I design products that use them.

They're developing at a pretty impressive rate so the cells in a product you bought a year or two ago are going to behave quite differently to one bought today with the latest tech. We use a lot of 18650's and we're now looking at gen4 cells becoming available to us in the near future - these will not only be about 3 times the energy density as the first generation cells but the Current profiles (the rate you can take the energy out of the battery) are now astounding. We're on the brink of having lightweight affordable battery packs with a respectable run time that can provide more steady state power than you can pull from a 13A mains socket. Mental.

Most of the time a duff cell will be the result of poor electronic management. Most decent multi-cell batteries now have single cell monitoring (now a legal requirement in a lot of consumer products with li-ion cells) which in basic terms means each cell is independently charged and discharged rather than treating a block of cells as a single entity. This prevents the irreversible deep discharge of individual cells and keeps the battery happier for longer.

As you've probably realised the performance of a cell will depend on a number of variables so it's difficult to give useful numerical answers to your questions. Will it do 600 half charges? Probably not. Will it do more than 300? Almost certainly if charged at a sensible temperature with the correct charger. Will you notice any discernible difference between a battery stored at 25% charge and one stored at 75% charge? I doubt it. Can you damage them? If you abuse them, yes. Don't do that, things can go south really quickly

 

[Old jon]

^^^ I like this.

Time to count on my fingers. Its an empirical, wooly answer, cos that is all the info I have. The lights on the geared bike have been in use since June 2015. Charged every three rides, seven to nine hours use, cos that is about three quarters of the run time of the front light. So, once a week charging, 120 times roughly, seems like I have at least that much again before I need to think of replacements. This thread has done well, for me.