My Battery Got Pregnant

[Tmox]

The swollen battery is probably my fault.

This is the situation that led up to the swollen battery:

• When I got off the beach and in to my truck I plugged the spare battery in to the charger running off an inverter.
• Later in the day I hooked the charger up to the battery was still on the detector while still in the truck.
• Even later that day I had to drive up north to take care of some issues, the detector was still hooked up to the charger.
• Yesterday's detecting session I detected until the battery died- it ran the normal time about 3 hours. when I swapped batteries I saw the one I took off was swollen.

Some facts you may not know:

• The batteries don't get much more than lukewarm when I charge them
• I notice that once charged if you cycle the power on the charger on and off that the battery will charge 10 to 30 more minutes.
• My charger is electronically noisy, if I use it next to a fm radio tuned to a weak station it will inject a lot of static noise in to the radio audio.
• The other battery is just fine.

This is what I think happened to my battery:

• The battery could well have gotten hot charging in the truck, sometimes its sunny here.
• the battery went through multiple charging cycles that day because every time I started the truck the power cycled to the charger and the battery charged just a little bit more.

I think in this scenario that I abused the battery, it got hot and the case deformed. My takeaways are that I will not charge in the truck anymore and I will not let the power to the charger cycle when I am charging batteries.

I have not opened the battery up to look inside in the event First Texas wants to take a look at this thing. I'm dying to open it up and look inside, If I do I will post the pictures for all you inquiring minds.

 

One last comment; I am extremely happy with the detector and this very unusual way the detector ended up getting released. It is amazing that we are able to interact with the inventor and his design team, and the chief engineer for the whole company. This just doesn't happen in the real world and we are very lucky to be in this situation. I appreciate it very much. Thanks Rick, Alexandre, Willy, Le Jag and Geotech Carl.

 

 

Cheers,

Tim

[schoolofhardNox]

25 minutes ago, Tmox said:

 

                                                               "Comment edited"

 

One last comment; I am extremely happy with the detector and this very unusual way the detector ended up getting released. It is amazing that we are able to interact with the inventor and his design team, and the chief engineer for the whole company. This just doesn't happen in the real world and we are very lucky to be in this situation. I appreciate it very much. Thanks Rick, Alexandre, Willy, Le Jag and Geotech Carl.

 

 

Cheers,

Tim

Agree 100%. It's not often, well actually NEVER 😉that you get that much involvement in a new product. On the flip side it must be a roller coaster for them to read comments that may go from "I absolutely love this machine" to "Your machine is a piece of junk" I feel for them, and trying to please everyone is never going to happen. It will be interesting to see how the next generation of the Impulse ends up.

[GB_Amateur]

6 hours ago, schoolofhardNox said:

On the flip side it must be a roller coaster for them to read comments that may go from "I absolutely love this machine" to "Your machine is a piece of junk" I feel for them, and trying to please everyone is never going to happen.

Isn't this what happens every time a brand new detector hits the market?  We've certainly seen some of that even here, and detectorprospector.com is pretty tame compared to many modern communication channels (that term sounds too tame, but I'm sure you get the picture 😉).

[Chase Goldman]

7 hours ago, schoolofhardNox said:

It's not often, well actually NEVER 😉that you get that much involvement in a new product.

Nokta comes close to providing such access and tapping into the pulse of their user base.  The designer of the Tarsacci MDT 8000 is also similarly approachable.  It's also not often that users are willing to pay for the privilege of essentially beta testing a detector.  So it is kind of expected the designers would take such a vested interest in the feedback, good or bad.  Looks like it has been a pretty successful experiment in product development that should spur other manufacturers to sit up and take notice.

[Chase Goldman]

8 hours ago, Tmox said:

I have not opened the battery up to look inside in the event First Texas wants to take a look at this thing. I'm dying to open it up and look inside, If I do I will post the pictures for all you inquiring minds.

FT probably doesn't care as they don't design nor manufacture the battery and are moving away from NiMH in the next Impulse iteration anyway.

I would advise against opening it up because that just makes contained disposal that much more difficult and the gas and chemicals that are contributing to the condition are some nasty stuff.

[Tony]

Apologies.....I mistakenly thought the AQ battery was a Lithium chemistry.

 

[Willy]

14 hours ago, schoolofhardNox said:

Agree 100%. It's not often, well actually NEVER 😉that you get that much involvement in a new product. On the flip side it must be a roller coaster for them to read comments that may go from "I absolutely love this machine" to "Your machine is a piece of junk" I feel for them, and trying to please everyone is never going to happen. It will be interesting to see how the next generation of the Impulse ends up.

Simple, we just make the average of all the comments on THIS forum and if it is over 0, we are quite happy.😉😢

For the OTHER forum(s), we just ignore them.

[Willy]

7 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

Nokta comes close to providing such access and tapping into the pulse of their user base.  The designer of the Tarsacci MDT 8000 is also similarly approachable.  It's also not often that users are willing to pay for the privilege of essentially beta testing a detector.  So it is kind of expected the designers would take such a vested interest in the feedback, good or bad.  Looks like it has been a pretty successful experiment in product development that should spur other manufacturers to sit up and take notice.

For us, it is the least we should do to users who have paid to be guinea pigs.

[Willy]

8 hours ago, GB_Amateur said:

Isn't this what happens every time a brand new detector hits the market?  We've certainly seen some of that even here, and detectorprospector.com is pretty tame compared to many modern communication channels (that term sounds too tame, but I'm sure you get the picture 😉).

We try to compensate for the lack of official marketing communication channel.

[Rick K - First Member]

I arranged for Tim to get a shippping label Monday to send the battery to FTP. They want to see and evaluate it.