I am wondering how to properly test 3 - battery packs that I have around my home which are used my cordless power tools (drill, circular saw, etc). These 3 packs are for a Craftsmen set of power tools and from the attached pictures, you can see they are 19.2V.
I know that simply putting a volt meter across the terminals on the battery pack will not properly measure the state of the battery. I do have a battery tester that I purchased online to test my car or boat battery, so I'm wondering if this might work? If it an option, how do I test? If this will not work, what do I need in order to properly test / measure the state of these power packs?
Thanks for this.... I have a couple of multimeters in my home, but how do you measure without a load? I believe some kind of load needs to be applied (but maybe not).
Your old battery tester is designed for lead acid batteries which work differently from NiCd.
For what you have best is to give it a full charge then measure voltage without a load to get an idea of status. Those 19.2s are made of multiple batteries and normal failure is one of the batteries fails/shorts so overall no longer measures 19 volts.
Most don't go further but a simple load test would be to run the battery with your device for a couple minutes and measure the voltage afterwards.
@doughess: the OP has an old battery that is a simple string.
An exact number like a voltage reading really isn't important and doesn't tell you much. I wouldn't bother "testing" the batteries. Do they take a charge? Do they power your tools for a reasonable amount of time? If you answer no to either it's bad. If you answer yes to both then it's good enough.
That pack is from 2004. It would be reasonable to assume it's at or past the end of its useful life.
Most of those older packs use sub-C nicad cells which you can get to rebuild the pack. When you base the cost of the replacement cells vs the cost of those packs.... it would be more cost effective to just replace the pack.
you can often find NI MH packs to replace your existing NI CAD and they work with your charger probably not worth messing with trying to fix when you can buy new battery packs and there not very expensive in this case.
Tread question, how to test battery pack did mention specific technology.Testing NiCad, Ni MH and lithium battery packs is not very informative as to condition.
Lithium far outperform others on a cost and energy basis. See data in chart:
Why bother with Ni Cads or NiMH? DH has replaced NiCad cells in battery packs with lithium cells from scrapped from old units, greatly improving power and usage time.+
If old battery pack has electronics board, discarded it and wired cells directly to pack terminals. How to charge that pack is another issue.
If old battery pack has electronics board, discarded it and wired cells directly to pack terminals. How to charge that pack is another issue.
This one example of what not to do.
We are focused on a nicad battery pack because that's what it says right on it. You cannot substitute Li ion batteries for nicads without specifying how to charge them. It's not enough to just say "charging is another issue" as li ion batteries charged on a nicad charger will explode.
Thank you everyone for all of the suggestions.... it looks like the best (and safest) idea is just to buy a set of 2 new batteries for under $30 which is much cheaper than I thought they would be.
So when my house was built in about 1999 or so, they wired the attached garage to be powered from the same circuit as the living room. Which probably was fine in principle, but in reality they screwed up a couple things.
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[*]First off, this circuit has mixed 12 and 14 gauge on a 20A breaker, which I am going to correct ASAP by swapping out the breaker to a 15A, and mark the wires in the panel so nobody tries to "upgrade" to a 20A in the future.
[*]The other issue is I don't have enough power to operate all my stuff in my garage. [i]Everything[/i] in the garage including lights, receptacles, door opener, and so on are all on this same circuit. I occasionally trip a breaker when say using a shop-vac and something else in the living room at the same time.
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So to rectify that, what I would like to do is run [i]at least [/i]2 new 20A circuits to the garage, and disconnect from the existing circuit. The walls are all open in the garage, I have plenty of space in the breaker panel, and easy access right now to pull new wire.
The only twist is that I cannot remove the existing wiring back to the living room as that is all behind finished ceiling and walls. And stapled everywhere so no way to pull out the old wire. And I don't know how/where they tied all this together, so tough to disconnect at the source end.
So I want to cap off (wire nut) the old wiring in the existing garage outlet boxes, but leave them energized. (Keeping box fill requirements in mind.) And then power the receptacles with these new circuits that I run.
So:
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[*]Is this allowed by code to cap off and leave energized wires in a box like this?
[*]And is it OK to have two unrelated circuits in a box?
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I think the answer to both questions is yes, but I would like a confirmation of such.
Thanks!
I have a main panel and two subpanels very close to each other (one is 4" away and the other one is on the other side of the wall.
There are some splices inside the main panel. The conductors coming from the meter is AWG 3/0. What is the green plastic splices call in the images below? The one that the main conductors and the feeder conductors are lumped together.
[img]https://i.postimg.cc/c1PfW94H/IMG-20200316-174358.jpg[/img]
[img]https://i.postimg.cc/RCWwj5my/IMG-20210107-133808.jpg[/img]
Is this the best way to do these big splices or are there better ways?
01-09-21, 08:17 AM
