"J. Clarke" wrote in message
...
Steve Knight wrote:

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 19:57:13 -0500, John Smith
wrote:

Mike,

Draining a nicad battery will not destroy it. In fact, nicads
have a memory effect, through which the battery thinks it is
discharged, when it isn't. The best way to deal with that
situation is to completely discharge the battery once in a while.

that's a myth that has been history almost as long as the cells
themselves
(G)most people would have no way of completely discharging the cells
anyway.

??? A piece of wire won't do it?

and overdoing it will kill the cells pretty fast.

--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

The serious radio controlled car racers used to use NiCad batteries and
discharged them nearly completely after using them and before charging them
the next time. A wire has too little resistance, and could discharge the
cells so fast as to cause heat damage, so resistors of the right value were
used. Couldn't just use one resistor across the ends of the battery
(battery = several cells in series), as some cells would discharge before
others, and the one(s) that discharged first could be exposed to reverse
charging from the rest; a bad thing. As a result, folks made fixtures that
applied the correct resistance across each cell (if there were 6 cells in
the battery, it took 6 resistors), requiring connections to the junction
between each pair of cells. Don't know if this would be practical for the
types of batteries used in power tools.
Kerry (ex RC racer)