Pairing Your Batteries

Just a quick note about my apparent obsession with rechargeable batteries.  I wanted to talk about pairing up your NIMH batteries.  Science junk aside, NIMH like to work in sets of evenly worn and charged cells.  Alkaline batteries were much the same, however, since they got tossed at the end of their use, it wasn’t as big of a deal.  However, when you are working with eneloops rated at 1000 charge cycles, killing out that $11 set of batteries probably isn’t the best idea.  I just put a piece of masking tape around the battery and mark it with a unique name for the set, and an auxiliary number that marks the cell.  For instance as previously mentioned I use 8 AA eneloops in my D300.  I have marked them as MB1 and MB2 (the grip is the MBD-10) and then each cell is numbered as 1-8.  The individual numbers allow me to trace weakening cells to one problem cell and the larger set can be replaced with a new set while the other set is broken down to fuel remotes and other single and dual cell devices.

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