Hot Deal! I think I’ve mentioned a few times before that I like to get nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries from a mail order place called www.batteryspace.com . I don’t know if the Powerizer cells and packs that they sell are the best matched super-duper cells that you would want if you go racing, but I’ve been using various sized batteries from them for some time in scale boats, transmitters, and digital cameras with out any complaint.

Best part is, they beat the price of even low buck houses like Tower, and I’ve never had an issue with delivery. Note: I’ve also found good prices on ebay for batteries, but each time I’m dealing with some body new… it’s nice to have a one-stop shopping place that carries a wide variety of cells, packs, chargers, and other goodies like shrink-tube for building your own packs.

If you haven’t looked into replacing all your Nicads with NiMH, do! NiMH’s are much easier to live with- no memory effect, you don’t need to fully discharge (“cycle”) them before recharging, they have huge storage capacity, and the latest series have high discharge rates that even let them step into those hot racing applications.

If you’re using loose double A’s for your transmitter or digital camera, I recommend getting one of their quantity deals (like 24 or 60 in a box!), as well as a microprocessor controlled charger (“dumb” trickle chargers are a good way to ruin cells, imho). The NiMHs will live longer in the high-drain rate applications like cameras, which eat up alkalines, and they have higher storage capacity too. I go to an event with fresh-charged batteries in the camera, and a spare set too. Ditto for my box load of cheap radios which use AAs.

If you’re looking for general purpose packs of no particular configuration, you might find a two-fer deal at Batteryspace on items like 6-cell 7.2v r/c car packs, which I use in a lot of my scale boats. For example, two 3300 mAh packs for a total of less than $33.

I’ve also bought loose cells, or odd packs which I can tear down and reconfigure as I like. In my tugboat, I have a 6v system- used to be a gel cell, but I needed to make room in the hull for a big smoke unit… so I replaced the gel-cell with three five-cell sticks of full-C sized 4000 mAH NiHHs… the sticks lay down low in the hull, freeing up lots of space, and they give me a whopping 12 AH of juice. I also got the shrink tube for these packs from Batteryspace.

For radios that come with NiCad packs, keeping a good charge isn’t easy. Not only do you have the NiCad memory issue to deal with, but these packs are typically only 600 mAH in size. At Batteryspace, you can get a pair of 2000 mAH radio packs for less than $26. Tower only has 9.6v Tx packs in 1450 mAH size, and they’re over $30 EACH.

I mentioned the special chargers needed for NiMH- I have one little guy dedicated to AA’s, it will smart-charge ten at a time. For the big packs, I found a more suitable charger through Tower- automatically runs many size packs, NiCad or NiMH, and can have the charge rated adjusted as you like.