Smart Battery Charger

How many times have you wanted a fresh pair of batteries for your remote,  toys or any gadgets and got none? You have dozens of pairs of batteries but none working?

Your kid gives a nice pose, you see a beautiful scenery or a rare bird and in the nick of time, you find the camera batteries have dried out. For the geek in you, you obviously have moved from dry cell batteries to rechargeable batteries – NiCd or NiMH. But even this wouldn’t solve the problem. They tend to discharge very fast and worse they don’t last as long as promised.

Thanks to Murphy, when ever there is dire need of a fully charged battery, you wouldn’t have it.

I have faced all these problem several times and lost precious moments. I have trashed many of my rechargeable batteries thinking either they are dead or run out of their steam. I was looking for tips online on how to revive such batteries and stumbled on a nice gadget.

La Crosse Technology‘s smart and intelligent battery charger - BC-700 Alpha Power Battery Charger. After reading its reviews, I immediately ordered it from Amazon. Apparently, I found it cheaper on Amazon (even including custom duty) than local or overseas shippers.

BC-700 Alpha Power Battery Charger: All Advantages

This ‘smart’ charger can detect how much of charge is left in your battery and charge accordingly. The conventional ‘dumb’ chargers will keep charging your batteries irrespective of full or empty and ultimately destroying it if not unplugged after use. If you have ever noticed your batteries heat up extensively while charging, then the charger is killing them slowly.

As per the manufacturer, this charger features:

• 4 modes: charge, discharge, refresh, and test
• Overheat Detection to Protect Over-Charging
• Charges both AA & AAA rechargeable batteries simultaneously
• 4 separate LCD displays for simultaneous readouts
• All Modes Automatically Default to 200mA Charge (the optimal setting for prolonging battery life)

The nifty LCD screen shows charge/discharge status of each of the battery. The three buttons – current, display and mode can be used in combination to make numerous independent settings for each battery. You can revive dead rechargeable batteries using the ‘refresh’ mode which charges and discharges the battery up to 10 times.

The best feature is the ‘Discharge’ mode can be used to remove the memory effect of rechargeable batteries. All in all this is one of the best gadget added to my collection in recent times.

If you have used any other charger or had faced any problem with batteries, do share them here.