Hello from Iowa

I spent a few days reading and learningand plan on taking baby steps on my first project.

Discharge tests TAKE forever!!

Yes discharge tests take a while. Use non smart chargers to charge near terminal voltage 4/2v,3.6 etc depending on cell chemistry
later floyd

Jrombou said:

I spent a few days reading and learningand plan on taking baby steps on my first project.

Discharge tests TAKE forever!!

Click to expand...

Welcome to the group Most of us discharge at 1000ma which will normally take just over a couple of hours for a fully charged cell, you might be discharging at a lower rate. Good luck with your project

Jrombou said:

I spent a few days reading and learningand plan on taking baby steps on my first project.

Discharge tests TAKE forever!!

Click to expand...

It does take time. I use 3 x OPUSs on my office deskand process 12cells / day using 500ma discharge. That's over 200days to process the 2500 cells I need for my latestpair of14s88p batteries made from RING packs. For me, I don't mind doing this a bit each day as the cells need to set and then building the packs takes time and I have to buy the cells over time.... so I do it in parallel /slow motion. However,after a couple of years of slow and steadyI'm nearing 10,000 cells (108kwhbattery bank).

BUT I understand, to speed things up that's why people build charge/discharge stations of 5 or 10 or 20 OPUSs or mega chargers etc. And 1000ma discharge is faster but my OPUSs would overheat so I went 500ma because I didn't understand in the early days about cooling them properlyand now I stick with it for consistency.

You don't say your goals / timeline but you can extrapolate after you do your first X cells / get a process down... and then see what you need to do.

OffGridInTheCity said:

Jrombou said:

I spent a few days reading and learningand plan on taking baby steps on my first project.

Discharge tests TAKE forever!!

Click to expand...

It does take time. I use 3 x OPUSs on my office deskand process 12cells / day using 500ma discharge. That's over 200days to process the 2500 cells I need for my latestpair of14s88p batteries made from RING packs. For me, I don't mind doing this a bit each day as the cells need to set and then building the packs takes time and I have to buy the cells over time.... so I do it in parallel /slow motion. However,after a couple of years of slow and steadyI'm nearing 10,000 cells (108kwhbattery bank).

BUT I understand, to speed things up that's why people build charge/discharge stations of 5 or 10 or 20 OPUSs or mega chargers etc. And 1000ma discharge is faster but my OPUSs would overheat so I went 500ma because I didn't understand in the early days about cooling them properlyand now I stick with it for consistency.

You don't say your goals / timeline but you can extrapolate after you do your first X cells / get a process down... and then see what you need to do.

Click to expand...

To be honest I just started the accumulating cells for simple home automation projects. I have many sensors throughout my home that I wanted to operate on battery. Spent a lot of time with different ESP's and fine tuning the sleep mode of various chips.

Now with the recent Derecho experience I thought about building a small system (1kWh) so that I can provide a backup to my home automation hub and build onto that as the painfully slow processing continues.

I am undecided on the actual voltage level that I will use but figured if I use a P approachI can build on that to increase voltage Swhen I get to that point.

I built a few TP4056 stations for charging and picked up a Zanflare charger that would provide discharge ability(I'm using 500ma setting). The batteries I have are recycled and have a Nom discharge of ~ .440and so far a pretty consistent ~2200mah capacity give or take 10ma with 4.2v.

Currently I am trying to understand theIr report that the Zanflare provides. Not sure how accurate that reading is.

So far I have about 139 cells, so in between tests I am getting familiar with the next step. One thing that is unclear is the wait time between preliminary charge and moving to the testing stages. How long is long enough? I have been waiting about a week before putting them in discharge/charge.

I am a tinkerer and even if this is a slow process I am learning a lot.

I use 10 opus. So i basically do 80 cells per day. More than enough for most people