Hi everyone

If you are reading this it means the hybrid battery on your car is worn out and needs to be replaced

My hope is to educate you on what to look for when deciding which battery to purchase

Hybrid Hero MKE has been in business for 10+ years and we like to share our experiences with you.  So are you ready for a deep dive into how a NiMh battery works?  If so read on

There are hundreds of sellers on ebay and they all seem to offer the same battery but at different prices with different attributes

So how do you decide?

Let's start with some myths

Myth #1

The higher the voltage the better the battery

It seems to make sense.  Why wouldn't I want the highest voltage possible?   The more the better right? 

The reality is that voltage tells you nothing about the capacity of the battery.  Capacity is the key factor when deciding how long a battery will last (and consequently how much you should pay for it).  The higher the capacity the better the battery.

Capacity is measured in AH (amp hour).  In the case of these batteries sometimes you will also see MAH (milli amp hour).  It is the same thing.  Milli amp hour is just amp hour divided by 1000. 

A brand new battery from Panasonic is rated at 6.5Ah or 6,500mah

This means if you were to discharge this battery with a load of 6.5 amps it will last 1 hour

Over time a battery loses it's capacity and eventually it holds so little electrical energy that it no longer functions properly

This is what causes the red triangle to illuminate or the notification to check your hybrid system to pop up on your dash display

So what you want is a battery with a known capacity

Very few sellers advertise the capacity of the batteries that they sell. 

Why is that you might ask? 

The reason is because it takes several hours of measurement in order to obtain this piece of information. 

So it is easier to just sell a battery without measure the capacity

The problem is when you don't know the capacity you have no way to estimate how long the battery will last

Imagine if you bought a tire but you were not told how much tread is remaining.  And since capacity is not something you can quickly measure you are blind.  No one would buy a tire without knowing the amount of tread remaining.  And the more tread there is the more that tire is worth.

Most sellers simply harvest batteries out of a car and ship you that battery.  They check the voltage and sometimes even charge it up.  But they do not know how much capacity is remaining

Here at Hybrid Hero MKE we take the time to measure each battery prior to shipping it to you

This way you know what you are paying for

Myth #2

The more cycles the battery is put thru the better

You will see sellers say that they put their battery thru 3 cycles or 5 cycles or even 10 cycles. What does this even mean?

A cycle is a when you fully charge a battery and fully discharge a battery

The idea is to impress you with how many times they cycled their battery however the number of cycles doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the quality of the battery

If a battery is worn out it might take a few minutes to charge it and consequently a few minutes to discharge it.  So doing this over and over again doesn't make the battery any better.

Imagine a battery is a cup.  Capacity is how much water a cup can hold.  A cycle is like filling the cup and dumping the water out.  Doing this over and over doesn't make the cup hold more water. 

At the end of the day all you care about is how much water the cup holds i.e. how much capacity the battery has

We here at Hybrid Hero MKE measures each battery by charging it and recording how much electricity went in and discharging it and recording how much electricity came out.

This is the capacity of the battery. 

It takes about 1 hour to charge and 1 hour to discharge a single battery (assuming a 6,000+mah capacity battery).  So this is what you are paying for when you purchase our batteries.   We take the time to determine the capacity so you don't have to. 

And to conclude this long diatribe about batteries you want all your batteries to have the same capacity when you replace them

This is called balancing.  Some people think balancing is having the same voltage on all the batteries.  This is incorrect.  What you want is the same capacity since all the batteries are hooked up in series.  Let's go back to the tire analogy.   The voltage is like the air pressure in each tire.  Sure you can pump each tire up to 30psi.  But if the tires are all bald then they won't last.  Remember the capacity is akin to how much tread is on each tire.  Voltage is how much air pressure is in each tire

Would you want a bald tire that is aired up to 40psi?  Of course not

That's what a lot of sellers are listing on ebay

They can force charge a battery to show a high voltage.  But now you know better

If you got this far congratulations!  

Here is your reward

The battery in this listing took 1 hour and 5 minutes to charge and recorded 6,501mah

And it took 1 hour and 1 minute to discharge and recorded 5,964mah

And remember what a brand new battery is rated for?  That right 6,500mah

For this listing we will only ship you batteries which have over 6,000mah on the charge cycle which is over 92.3% of a new battery

If you have more questions please feel free to reach out to a hero at Hybrid Hero MKE