olemikey Loc: 6 mile creek, Spacecoast Florida

Reading a story out of Smithsonian.com about a new battery technology - Nanowire Gel rechargeable cells, stumbled upon in the lab, by changing the medium the nanowire is suspended in from a liquid to a gel has resulted in supposed recharge/discharge cycles in the aforementioned 30K to 50K range. Being a big user of rechargeable batteries of all types, I find this to be welcome news. One battery that I can use for 20 years and not have to dispose of after a few...hooray!! Will be interesting to watch development of this story. Here is link - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/did-researchers-stumble-battery-lasts-forever-180958955/



PS - don't look up Forever Batteries, you will just get a lot other batteries.

CaptainBobBrown

Yea! I buy 'AA' batteries 60 at a time (Costco) and go through them in a few months. One of biggest uses is for touch free soap dispensers at all our sinks so I'm converting them all to plug-in using some cheap AC/DC transformers. Nanowire batteries just won't get here soon enough.

Still this development plus paper thin RFID devices which can get their power directly from ambient RF photons will make us think about replaceable batteries like we now do about land line phones.

speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

I've been using the same eneloop's for over 10 years now, have recharged them several thousand times, so well over the suggested limit now, without any problems ever, they are like new in performance!

olemikey Loc: 6 mile creek, Spacecoast Florida

Yes, I have also run some cells and prime camera batteries for many years, even my high performance LiPo's that get tortured in radio control applications sometimes go on for some time (extreme high discharge rates 30-80 amps, high rate fast charges 5-10 amps). I've never kept count on the Li-On cells in the cameras, but I suppose you could calculate an approximate based on how many shots per charge and how far you discharge each cell or battery, on average. I usually recharge around the 50% range (+/- 15%) and discourage running cells all the way down (some cameras will lose functionality below 25% anyway) as I feel it is bad for any rechargeable.

For example; 50,000 clicks, recharge at 50% level on camera (call it 350 clicks just to establish an average number) gives <150 charge cycles (142.85), 100,000 clicks same camera 50% = 286 recharge cycles. In the examples I'm leaving out prolonged storage periods, as that can change the numbers a bit.

Many high quality cells can do 1,000 charge cycles w/o fail, which at 50% would yield something like 350K pictures using my 350 click average. If I ran my current Nikon D7100 down to 25% it will yield something like 700/750 clicks (depending on how I use it, of course) so for that one 250,000 \ 700clicks I'm looking at <360 charge cycles. For the high shot count pro, these would be more critical numbers than they are for me. On any day I might shoot 200 to 300, but I might only take 10 the next.

Be interesting to see where the tech takes us.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

IJEA rechargeables are just as good as Eneloop (some speculate they are made in the same factory) and much less expensive.