Dennis Nedry
Well-known member
I have a Pismo battery that went one day from holding a charge for an hour to not taking a charge, the light would not even blink on it. I took it apart and manually (eek!) charged the thing up to 12V using a very low amount of current. But yes it was normal DC, which may not have been the best method.
Anyway, it was flat so I didn't have any reason not to try. I charged it at only 200 mA for a LONG time and kept monitoring the temperature and voltage, and finally it got up to 12V. I stuffed it into my Pismo, and BEHOLD, the Pismo ran for over an hour with the processor maxed out and screen all the way bright.
There are some interesting things that happened, though:
-Before doing this, the battery reported a charge capacity of 2 mAh, and would not take a charge.
-After manually charging, capacity report jumped to 401 mAh (strange).
-In an attempt to initialize this, I ran the Pismo for a long time, and the % charge went down to zero within 15 minutes. Pismo continued to run for another 45 minutes at 0% reported charge.
-Further attempts to charge the battery from inside the laptop are successful, but battery light always blinks, even at 100%, and it will only charge to 401 mAh. It stops charging at this point when it obviously can hold much more.
It would be awesome to reset this little mAh capacity meter, maybe this battery can continue working normally then. I don't know why that reading went UP after manually charging, it would be nice if I could make it go up again. I don't think anybody really knows how to reset this though, I've never heard of anybody doing it.
It must be able to reset when you bring in a laptop battery to be professionally repacked, though! Otherwise none of those would take a charge. Should I try disconnecting the cells for a while and see what happens when I hook them back up?
Anyway, it was flat so I didn't have any reason not to try. I charged it at only 200 mA for a LONG time and kept monitoring the temperature and voltage, and finally it got up to 12V. I stuffed it into my Pismo, and BEHOLD, the Pismo ran for over an hour with the processor maxed out and screen all the way bright.
There are some interesting things that happened, though:
-Before doing this, the battery reported a charge capacity of 2 mAh, and would not take a charge.
-After manually charging, capacity report jumped to 401 mAh (strange).
-In an attempt to initialize this, I ran the Pismo for a long time, and the % charge went down to zero within 15 minutes. Pismo continued to run for another 45 minutes at 0% reported charge.
-Further attempts to charge the battery from inside the laptop are successful, but battery light always blinks, even at 100%, and it will only charge to 401 mAh. It stops charging at this point when it obviously can hold much more.
It would be awesome to reset this little mAh capacity meter, maybe this battery can continue working normally then. I don't know why that reading went UP after manually charging, it would be nice if I could make it go up again. I don't think anybody really knows how to reset this though, I've never heard of anybody doing it.
It must be able to reset when you bring in a laptop battery to be professionally repacked, though! Otherwise none of those would take a charge. Should I try disconnecting the cells for a while and see what happens when I hook them back up?