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Why Discharge? — Why use a discharger?


All of the Why Discharge? topics can be found together in our Why Discharge? white paper. (PDF, 35KB)


There are two good reasons:
  1. It can save you money.
  2. It extends the life of your packs and improves their performance.
Your battery packs are expensive and anything you can do to extend their life will help you to maximize your investment. Along with a good charger and proper storage, CamLight System's Pack Dischargers and Auto-Cutoff Modules are designed to extend the life of your NiCd and NiMH packs by conditioning the cells and insuring that they retain as much capacity as possible over the years.

Not using a discharger that automatically turns off at the correct voltage (approx. 0.9V/cell) can lead to:
  • Over-discharging and reversal of one or more cells, damaging the pack. This causes loss of capacity, high self-discharge rates and reduced voltage under load. This damage is cumulative and may not be immediately noticeable or the damage might mistakenly be attributed to other causes.
  • Under-discharging and the loss of capacity and voltage depression resulting from unwanted large cadmium crystal growth.
We still have packs from 1992 being used here at CamLight, charged/discharged several hundred times, and it's the combination of proper charging, discharging with the right value load to a known cutoff voltage, and proper storage that makes this possible. Omit any of these three things and the life of your packs will be shortened.


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