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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?"
the lack of available specs. and guarantees.
You are handing them a black box that doesn't work, and getting back one that does. This leaves a great deal of room for them to use cheaply available surplus cells to refurb. the pack. The fact is, if your battery is more than a year old it's very likely cells of the same dimensions and voltage are available with even better amp-hour ratings than the original. But it's hard for companies to compete who sell a product with the improved batteries as the metrics buy which their competition, and the original manufacturer are rated are nebulous, fakeable and often unavailable. I've had good luck with the people at PrimeCell.
Having played with Li-Ion charge circuits (yes, just the reference design from Atmel) I can see that calibration might be an issue. I don't however think it will be a critical one. Very smart chargers can in fact compensate for the changing characteristics of aging batteries. That the people replacing them would insert cells with characteristics within the "acceptable margins." of the compensating code doesn't sound impossible either.