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Refurbished Batteries, Good or Bad?
TheMadReaper asks: "I recently had to replace my laptop battery and couldn't decide whether to go for a new battery or a refurbished one. The refurbished ones are sold at a lot of places, but then I ran across this article that claims that refurbished batteries suck. For sure a bunch of you out there have tried refurbished batteries. So tell me, are they a good buy or a scam?"
We sell lots of laptops most of which sell with referb batteries and we have pretty good luck with them. Most last for 2-3 hours which is good enough for most people. I guess it depends on your standards for battery life.
The refurbisher disassembles the battery pack, replaces the individual cells inside, and recalibrates/replaces any charging circuitry if cells sharing the originals' charging characteristics can not be found. A fairly simple proceedure.
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
They're talking about ripping the batteries apart and replacing some or all of the individual cells inside. ...Read the article :-)
Like anything, there's room for problems.
Laptop battery packs generally will have a certain number of cells, of a certain type and electical specification. Replacing them (imagine that rectangular box filled with a bunch of AA cells) with the correct ones, and you may have a perfectly fresh batt-pack.
There are also some solid-state components in many battery packs; either replace them (if they're bad) or re-use them (if the refurbisher bothered to test them; most do). A common problem is somebody cutting or damaging these parts when taking the thing apart.
The cells need to be soldered, usually, and to metal, not wires. You need to know what you're doing when soldering batteries (heat can make 'em explode, or fail).
I've done a few myself; they work fine. The only reason I went that route, however, was because I had an old laptop I got for free and wanted to play with it, not spend a hundred or more bucks on it. I ended up spending about $50 for cells.
Having said that, I prefer fresh (newly manufactured) batteries over refurbished ones; a refurb is only as fresh as the cells the guy used to make it.
If you buy from a reputable refurbisher, I don't see a real problem; especially if he does enough volume to have fresh cells in the battpack. But, like anything, it's buyer beware; there are plenty of ways to screw it up, and you need to be able to trust your supplier.
Here in my local town, a competing computer shop sells 'refurbished' used computers that all they do is reformat the system; they don't even bother dusting them. This is a wide-spread problem that is due to perception. Some shops will, as another post mentioned, physically disassemble and refurbish the pack, or some shops will just 'recondion' it which is a matter of fully charging and fully discharging it a few times. Ask the shops how thoroughly they 'refurbish' the packs and ask if they are just simply refurbishing the charge (reconditioning) or the actual componets. This will also help test the honesty and friendliness of the shop!
Erutangis ym si siht.
Printer cartrages have been refurbished for years. HP and Cannon does it all the time. The method of how HP designed its cartrages with the replaceable print head built inside is like a battery when it comes to ware-and-tare. HP has lead contacts on the back edge for connecting to the printer. These contacts are not very well designed and don't really put up with the test of removing and replacing very well. Not to mention that the head (even if professionally cleaned) never work as well as a new one would.
Batteries face the same problems. The contacts get beat up and the batteries loose their memory if your blessed with a Nickel Cadium(NiCd) battery. Even if a NiCd is cleaned and refreshed it still lacks the physical ablitly to retain power for as long as a new one. The new type of rechargable battery (Nickel Platinum) is better at it but I've been hearing some bad things about them from some friends.
Best bet is to avoid them unless you want a spare or you get a really good deal.
Good luck.
No.
"calibration" of charging circuitry is BS. Look at the datasheets of any of the charge controller ICs from TI, National Semiconductor, etc. None of these have any "calibration", they are pretty generic. Li-Ion is actually not as hard to charge as many make it out to be, it is simply VERY different in its needs than NiCd or NiMH. In fact, proper charging of a LiIon is easier than proper charging of NiMH, although NiMH is much more resilient to improper charging.
Li-Ion charge cycle: Constant current, up to a maximum charging voltage. Constant-voltage at either 4.1 or 4.2 volts/cell depending on cell chemistry. (There are two different classes of Li-Ion cell, depending on the makeup of one of the electrodes.) It's not that hard. NiCd and NiMH need fancy charging schemes such as reverse slope detection. (Once fully charged, a NiCd or NiMH battery will actually REDUCE its voltage as it accepts more charge - "smart" NiMH chargers detect this.)
Battery meters (gas gauges) do need recalibration, and I admit that cell matching is reasonably important. Replacing a single cell in a pack is a no-no. Replacing all cells at once with new ones should be fine.
As to refurb printer cartridges: It's not the contacts on the HPs that are the issue, it's the method that HP uses to drive the ink droplets out. HP's inkjets are "thermal inkjets" - Each nozzle in the head has a small resistor in it. When the printer wants to shoot an ink droplet out, current is run through this resistor, and it vaporizes some of the ink. Needless to say, these resistors start burning out soon after the design life of the cart.
Canon and Epson printers are different - They use piezoelectric drivers which have near-infinite life. As a result, both Canon and Epson don't have nozzles and drivers in the cartridge, the cartridges are merely tanks of ink and nothing more. These can be refilled safely many times. (One just has to be careful about residual dried ink.) Some companies sell kits that allow you to do away with the cartridge and draw ink directly from a bulk ink bottle.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Single-cell replacement - BAD
Charge/discharge "reconditioning" - REALLY BAD
Replacement of all cells - You should be fine. The pack will be nearly as good as the OEM pack, sometimes better.
An example of a good pack reconditioner is Raymond Sarrio's business (www.batteriesamerica.com) - Although his selection of laptop batteries is limited, his specialty is in amateur (ham) radio batteries. Sarrio is well known as an excellent dealer in ham circles. Many of Sarrio's repacks are regarded as BETTER than the original packs. (The NiCd ones are only slightly better, but Sarrio offers NiMH repacks for equipment that was originally NiCd and never had a NiMH option.)
I did a NiMH repack myself in my Alinco DJ-580T's pack, with excellent results. I now have close to twice the battery life I had before, and that's using dirt-cheap super-low-capacity (1200 mAh) NiMHs.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?