A battery is a device that stores electrical energy in a chemical form and the areas they differ are the amount of energy that each can actually store. And therefore provide or deliver when required for use.

One of the more common required battery types is the Ni-Cd rechargeable battery which is most commonly used on commercial and industrial and high density residential situations. Correctly known as Nickel-Cadmium Cylindrical Cell, the battery can consist of various battery cells delivering different levels of voltage. Another type of rechargeable batteries is NiMh battery.

You probably know there’s a complex science associated with charging and maintaining lead acid type batteries, and that you can harm those batteries by incorrect charging, or overcharging, or by allowing them to discharge down to zero. So it should come as no surprise to learn that you can definitely harm your rechargeable batteries if you don’t optimize your charging procedures.

You can harm a battery by charging it too quickly, and you can harm a NiMh battery by overcharging it. Cheap chargers and fast chargers threaten to do either or possibly even both of these things to your valuable batteries.

A good charger will recondition and somewhat restore a battery, helping it to recover from neglect or severe depletion of charge, and will get the maximum possible life out of it, more recharge cycles and a slower reduction in capacity per recharge. A good charger can also give you real-time reporting on the capacity of the battery, and help you to understand which batteries are nearing the end of their lives and which are still in good shape.

A battery doesn’t just go stone cold dead after a certain number of recharges. All that happens is there is a steady degradation in the amount of storage capacity the battery has. At what point has this become unacceptably short? With rechargeable batteries freely available and inexpensive, many people consider that when the lifepo4 batteries have lost a third to a half their capacity, it is time to replace them. But if you are willing to accept less storage per charge, there’s no reason not to keep reusing and reusing them well beyond their rated life.