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?"

Comments

As a reseller .....

[matt65114]

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 problems with refurbs are...

[OwnerOfWhinyCat]

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.

Nothing wrong with recycled batteries here.

[zulux]

I've been using them in my laptops for over a year now, and let me tell you thA@@!....[NO CARRIER]

Re:How do you "refurb" a battery?

[FueledByRamen]

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.

Sure, it works, but ...

[gordguide]

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.

Depends on the reseller's idea of refurbishing.

[chewedtoothpick]

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!

Question I had before

[zogger]

--I brought this up in another thread, but it was really a thread drift effort, something I have wondered for a long time now. Why can't these laptop makers just come up with a slide in slide out battery pack that accepts off the shelf rechargeable batteries? D or C or AA cells? I have a couple of the bulk re-charging stations for those batteries (nicads is what I have) and they work great, and if you get a bad cell, it is easily replaced,stores all over sell them, and they relatively cheap. So many other consumer devices use standardized batteries, but as soon as you get to "computer" then non standardized and ridiculously expensive rules. Wazzup with that, is it as simple as they just make so much profit on their custom designed batt packs that they don't care?

X-ray of a PowerBook says you're right on the $

[adzoox]

Good point - look at an XRay of a PowerBook and what do you see?

Depends on the refurb method

[Andy Dodd]

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.