needed: charger for lots of batteries

[DrPizza]

Wandering what the biggest battery charger anyone's seen is... I'm looking for something that can deal with up to 100 AAA's at a time.

It'd even be great to find large lots of rechargeable AAA's. I've found plenty of places with 24 packs of AA's, but not AAA's.

(re: classroom use, graphing calculators.)

Thanks!

 

[frostedflakes]

You're serious? What for?

I don't think I've seen a charger that can do more than 8 batteries at a time. There may be industrial chargers that do what you want, though.

 

[DrPizza]

For what? I have another teacher who wants to switch over to rechargeable batteries for graphing calculators.
(Oh, and I've seen 10 battery chargers)

That person insists she's seen chargers that handle many more than that... I've never seen anything like that though. 100 graphing calculators x 4 batteries each is a lot of batteries to charge.

 

[pm]

The best places to buy batteries in bulk that I have seen are all-battery dot com and batteryspace.com.

For the charger, you could take something like a bunch of battery trays - like you can get from radio shack, wire them in series and then use a charger like this one:
http://www.*****/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=1597
Universal Fast and Smart Charger is designed for charging any 48V NiMH and NiCd Battery Packs. (40 Cells pack)

(the asterisks are "all-battery" dot "com" which for some reason doesn't pass the profanity filter at Anandtech).

Get 30 of these and then 3 of the chargers above
http://www.batteryspace.com/in...n=VIEWPROD&ProdID=2112

and wire them in series in sets of 10 in a line with 1 40-cell charger charging each string. That will handle 120 batteries at a time.

I have bought over 100 lithium ion cells from all-battery and found them to be a good company for that purchase and other smaller purchases.

 

[TimeKeeper]

http://cgi.ebay.com/T6988-10-C...tcZphotoQQcmdZViewItem

10 bay is the most I have seen. Hope that helps.

 

[DrPizza]

I'm not sure and can only speculate (I could probably check into it, but I'm tired and going to bed in a moment),

but, I think the reason that one link is blocked from here is because the all battery site was paying people to advertise on their sites with a certain minimum number of words in the post, and with other restrictions such as the person couldn't be a new member at a website. I've never been a fan of this type of marketing. Hence, I personally don't put a lot of faith into recommendations for that particular company.

However, thanks for the tips above.

 

[pm]

Thanks for the explanation. I checked their website and you are right, they do appear to do that, so it makes sense why Anandtech would filter the website. But, for what it's worth, they haven't paid me to post here, and I've honestly been happy enough with their service. I did build a fairly large electric vehicle battery pack (48V, 18Ah => 864W/h) based on a large lithium-ion order from them and they did a nice job delivering everything in a timely fashion, packing everything well, and all the cells worked.

But I've had similarly good experiences with Batteryspace.com as well. I've bought a lot of NiMH cells from Batteryspace - including a replacement pack for our Roomba recently - and they've been reliable for me as well.

 

[Jawo]

I have had good luck with Thomas Distributing but it looks like the biggest they have is a strip of eight.

 

[pm]

I agree. A lot of people on the electric vehicle forums that I'm involved with frequently mention Thomas Distributing as well for being a reliable, high quality vendor of rechargeable batteries and cells.