Back in June 2021, I wrote about recharging one of these battery packs - https://j0hn88.wordpress.com/2021/06/13/recharge-it-aeg-l1825r-2-5ah-45-wh-li-ion-battery-pack/
It happened that a week ago, I went to use my AEG drill and found that the battery wouldn't work. I had a look, and it wasn't the battery that I had fixed that time. The AEG brushless drill set that I bought at the time, came with two 18V batteries. This time, it was the second battery that had the issue.
The same sort of thing, remove the screws to get access to the individual lithium cells in the battery pack. I checked the voltages and found that two of them were lower than the others.
It was a matter of getting my Swallow charger out again, then charging each individual cell again. Even the ones that appeared to be fine would be topped up. This will allow all the cells to be in a similar state of charge when I use the battery pack again.
My Swallow charger was set to charge at 2.5A and 3.6V for the Lithium-Ion terminal voltage. The charger will stop automatically once the cell reaches 4.1V and charge current has dropped to almost zero.
While the cells were being charged, I looked up on eBay and found that the Ridgid 4AH battery packs were now around $43.99, so these have gone up $7 in the past two years - much like everything else has been going up.
Here is a photo of my charging setup, currently charging the second last cell. The Swallow is powered by a home-made power supply that provides 13.5V in series with an ammeter so that I can see how much current is being drawn. I built this power supply back in the mid-70's to power my amateur radio transceiver - which at the time, was a modified Midland CB radio. Incidentally, the box containing the ammeter also has a relay in it, so if the power supply were to turn off, it would automatically connect a 12V battery (not currently plugged into the back terminals).
I had previously noticed that the plastic on one of the banana plugs was going pale and cracking with age, and have bought replacements. I will eventually make up two leads with thicker wires.
I have another project that I will be using this AEG 18V battery pack for. I just need to get a couple of parts before I can do that and let you know what that project is.
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