When recycling old or defective battery packs, testing the individual cells can be quite time-consuming. The most common method involves running a charge/discharge cycle on each cell to measure its capacity. For instance, we offer charging and discharging battery testers from However, this method can take several hours per cell and requires expensive hardware.
Quicker method
Fortunately, there’s a quicker way to assess the condition of a battery: by measuring its internal resistance. If a cell’s internal resistance is significantly higher than the nominal value, it’s likely defective or nearing the end of its life.
We offer a range of dedicated that can perform this particular resistance test in under a second—much faster than the full charge/discharge cycle method.
Determining the actual remaining capacity
The downside of resistive testing is that it doesn’t provide an accurate measure of the battery’s remaining capacity. The test result simply indicates whether the battery is still functional. So if you need to determine the remaining capacity, you can streamline the process with a two-step approach.
1. Measure the resistance and discard any batteries with high resistance.
2. Perform a more extended test on the remaining cells to measure their capacity.
By using this two-step method instead of cycling through every cell, you can save a considerable amount of time and effort.
