After I have charged my spare lithum-ion camera battery I like to leave it in the charger with the mains disconnected.
(It's a handy place to keep the battery.)
In that sort of setup, would the disconnected charger still provide a circuit which slowly discharges the battery?
Most any manufacture will state in the instruction manual to NOT leave batteries in a charger. Leaving them in will do as you suspect, slowly drain them.
Yes.
Maybe, but probably yes
Contact the manufacturer of the charger. MOst of the times the instructions not to leave them in the charger assume that it is still plugged into the AC power line
It depends on the design of the charger, but in most cases there is no harm in leaving the battery in place. Lithium battery chargers have fairly complex control circuitry that will isolate the cell(s) from anything else.
Its not plugged in so the circuit isnt complete, you would have to run your own tests to see what happens.
On Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:40:32 +0100, Paul wrote in :
It all depends on the battery and the charger. Some are safe that way and some are not. Check the documentation.
Probably an effect which is no more than the effective self-discharge of the lithum-ion battery pack, and so nothing to worry about providing you don't leave there for months with no use.
If you leave the charger plugged in and it's a good quality charger, it may periodically do a top-up charge to counteract this. OTOH, it might not be a micropower standby product, and there's always a minisule extra fire risk (probably significantly less than from the lithum-ion battery itself though).
Lithium batteries have negligible self discharge. Unfortunately they do wear out just sitting there whether used or not, more quickly than NiCD and NiMH cells do.
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