Chargers overcharging batteries?

[H4X0R46]

Hello all you beautiful people! (I'm delirious and need to get my ass to bed lol). Anyways, on with the point of this post! So I noticed that my Efest Luc Blu6 charger did something strange while charging. One of my batteries was reading at 4.20v but the charger charged it at about 200mA for an extra 10 minutes or so.

My question, do most chargers show when a battery is overcharged? Will it SHOW 4.3v or something so you know it's trash? Or are they only capable of showing 4.2v? This is a pretty broad question I know, but hell, you guys never fail me!

 

[Vapin4Joy]

As far as I know most of the brand names have a cutoff of 4.2 for safety, there are a few high end chargers on the market that can be programed to your preferences.

 

[H4X0R46]

As far as I know most of the brand names have a cutoff of 4.2 for safety, there are a few high end chargers on the market that can be programed to your preferences.

Cool thanks! I just asked Efest themselves about this particular charger, and they said it can't detect an overcharged battery. I'll need to get me a multimeter really soon here....... I should already have one honestly :O

 

[Paratech]

More than likely it was actually at 4.19 and the display was rounding up.
That is why it continued to charge.

 

[Ryedan]

Hello all you beautiful people! (I'm delirious and need to get my ass to bed lol). Anyways, on with the point of this post! So I noticed that my Efest Luc Blu6 charger did something strange while charging. One of my batteries was reading at 4.20v but the charger charged it at about 200mA for an extra 10 minutes or so.

My question, do most chargers show when a battery is overcharged? Will it SHOW 4.3v or something so you know it's trash? Or are they only capable of showing 4.2v? This is a pretty broad question I know, but hell, you guys never fail me!

All of these chargers monitor battery voltage as they charge. They have to in order to charge them correctly and safely. OTOH, I have a decent multimeter and when I first get a charger I check battery voltage right after the charger shuts down. The spec is 4.2V +-0.05, so between 4.15-4.25V is acceptable. I have two, 2 bay chargers and bay to bay differences plus battery differences give me between 4.18-4.22V consistently. My chargers don't show voltage but if they did I would check them against my meter to see if they were accurate enough to count on.

Things can fail though, both out of the box and after a while, so I do the check when I get a new charger and then once in a while afterwards.

Anything above 4.25V will shorten the life of the batts and above 4.3V becomes unsafe.

 

[AndriaD]

More than likely it was actually at 4.19 and the display was rounding up.
That is why it continued to charge.

This... Right at the end, they do a "trickle charge", so it may sit at what *APPEARS* to be 4.2 but is actually just slightly lower and being rounded up, for quite some time, due to the slowness of that trickle charge. It shows in different ways, depending on the charger -- my efest Luc2 will actually show 4.2 but won't shut off for a few mins after it reaches that reading; my Xtar doesn't show voltage but percentage, and it will sit at 99% for what seems a long time, compared to the speed of the rest of the charge cycle.

Andria