Originally Posted by
ItsJustMe
You're having way better luck than I am. I've thrown away more than half the NiMH AAs that I've bought, and most have been pretty respectable brands. Lithiums seem to stand up to long term storage much better than NiMH. I wind up leaving batteries on the shelf for long periods of time and that seems to destroy NiMH.
Yeah - even lithium batteries like to be topped up every couple months though. It keeps them above their minimum required safe voltage level. Once the cells drop below 2.6 V its impossible for the average consumer to recover them.
The worst performing NiMH batteries hit the market when companies started to compete in a 'most capacity' contest. The lower capacity stuff lasted a lot longer but ..... was taken off the market when consumers scrambled for the newest high capacity versions.
Have you tried the Imedion or Enloops yourself? They seem to be OK in the LED lights I have that'll take AAs or AAAs. In fact, I'm using 10 of them (2100mA) to run a 10 watt LED P7 headlight and by inputting 12V can get about a week of 20 minute commutes out of that. I do use Lipos, but mostly as a single source for high drain lighting applications requiring 40 to 100 watts of power.