"Terry" wrote in message
...
My neighbour has a four year old 3.6 volt 850 milliamp/hr cordless
telephone handset battery which is used frequently and often for
long periods; i.e. talking continuously for several hours. Removed
from the handset and with no load the open circuit voltage of the
three cell battery is 4.02 volts.

She feels battery is defective; I feel it is overused between
charges!

Can anyone suggest please;
a) How long, continuously, can such a battery, when fully charged,
typically, operate the handset before requiring to be placed back
onto the main unit to be replenished?
b) What would be a typical or designed 'duty cycle' for a cordless
phone. i.e. what percentage of use away from the main unit versus
placed on the main unit for recharging?

It would seem that the designers must base the battery capacity of
some sort of average expectation of the amount of handset use away
from the main unit.

Similarly; we recently mislaid our 900 mhz cordless handset, for
nearly a week. When found its battery was 'flat'. It took several
days for the battery to recharge to operate 'normally'.

Comments welcomed. TIA


Would that all questions were so simple.

A rechargeable battery, whether Ni-Cad or Ni-MH, can be recharged
typically 500 times, give or take a bit.

If the battery is four years old and it has been caned, as your
description indicates, it is likely well past its sell-by date and
needs replacing - they don't cost the earth, assuming you can still
get one!


--
Woody

harrogate2 at ntlworld dot com