Archived from the Tools In Action forum (Power Tools). This thread is read-only.
What are the perks of these batteries and what is the beat way to make the charge last longer??
Hyper Lithium is just a trademarked name Ridgid uses. It’s no different than Milwaukee using the Red Lithium name or Makita using LXT. It’s just a name that represents their latest technology.
The benefits of lithium versus ni-cad are numerous, better in almost every way. Most of the early drawbacks to lithium have been mitigated to a point there is really no practical advantage to ni-cad anymore.
Do the Li batteries last longer on single chargers and do they benefit as far as lasting longer lifetime wise!!??
Yes lithium batteries are larger capacity now and deliver more power charge faster and can be charged at any time as you don’t need to run them flat before charging them like the old nicads ! As well they are lighter
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Modern LI-ion is a lot better than any the older types.
Lithium Ion batteries last the longest at 50% charge. And if you only charge them up to f.eks 80 % and stop discharging them at 20 %, you would probably make them last longer (a fair bit). But it’s not necessary, and I don’t know anyone that do this. 😛
The only disadvantage of lithium batteries pretty much is that they require electronic control to monitor them during charging so they don’t explode. Basically they go through three phases where at first it applies constant current and steadily increase voltage til it reaches the maximum limit of the cells. Then when after the voltage limit is reached it goes into a balancing phase where the cells voltages are balanced. Lastly it goes into a constant voltage phase where the current tails off and it more or less becomes a trickle charger. In the early days this was complicated and the electronics expensive but now that battery charge controllers are a dime a dozen the cost to include them is minuscule compared to the benefits.