Anthona wrote:
I just purchased online from home depot an edger/trimmer...In the
specifications it said electric, nothing mentioned about batteries.
and i thought that was what i getting. It turned out it was cordless
with 18v ni-cad battery. Now from past experience, i have had bad luck
with those batteries...mostly through my ignorance of different type
of batteries..Recently i learned that Lithium batteries were the
better choice, if i was going for cordless. I went back to the site
and sure enough, the heading of the sale did say cordless. Now can
someone tell me how to maintain these batteries when not in use?
Obviously here in the new england area i won't be using it all year.
The manual says nothing about that.


If it has a cheap slow charger that doesn't tell you when it's charged
and stop the charging itself, then after a couple hours when the battery
appears charged, I put the charger on a timer so it charges 15 minutes
every day. Works great for me, even on a crappy B&D batteries.

Don't do that every day for a fast charger, maybe a 15 minute charge
every 2 weeks to 1 month. The worst things for NiCads are leaving them
sit without being charged, using them until they are way too discharged
or overcharging them. The memory problem is pretty much cured these
days and using the tool until it starts to loose power is as low as they
need to be before a full charge. This doesn't mean run them dead, run
them low not dead.

I've read that lithium batteries prefer to be stored in a discharged
state. That doesn't work so well with me unless I bought an extra
battery on sale that I don't need to use yet. It would suck to have to
charge a Li-Ion before each use!