How bad is it to interrupt the charging of a battery?

Factual Questions
1

And does the length of the interruption make any difference?

2

What kind of battery?
NiCad? automotive? What? :confused:

3

I can’t think of any type of battery that would really care. Length of interruption wouldn’t make any difference either.

4

I’ve heard with brand new batteries you should fully charge and fully drain them the first couple times. After that it shouldn’t matter.

5

Again, what kind of battery? Your car battery would not like that treatment.

6

it’s pretty rude.

how do you like it when someone interrupts your discharges?

7

This is no longer true. It’s especially bad to do this with Lead-acid batteries, which have a low tolerance for deep discharge cycles.

8

That’s only for NiCds. Charge cycling is necessary a few times to develop the cell’s maximum capacity. Other rechargeable chemistries don’'t require (and some are detrimentally affected by) such treatment.

9

Might actually do some good.

Here’s a handy chart from Battery University:
http://batteryuniversity.com/partone-21.htm

10

A NiCD would care a whole lot. Length of interuption will make a huge difference as well, especially if it’s a long period. NiMH would not like it very much either, but it could handle it several times before getting upset.

11

Sorry, should’ve said: NiMH AAA rechargeables. I bought a couple (came with the charger) about a year ago, and their capacity seems dimished to me, despite infrequent use and what I thought was a reasonable charging/discharging strategy. The problem is that the charger came with no instructions as to how long or anything, and has no indicator lights to show when charging is complete, so I’ve never been sure how long a full charge should take.
The question I initially posed was because I had to unplug the charger momentarily while re-arranging my adapter situation, and I wondered if that sort of behavior would just hasten my batteries demise.

12

Get decent charger. Yours is probably a “float” charger, which will never get them to full capacity. Get a charger that has an “inflection point” charge termination, like the Ray-O-Vac: http://www.shentech.com/ps4kit.html