Batboard

About how many charge cylces is an impres battery in an XTS5000 good for?

All depends on the battery chemistry.

Li-ion are good for no more than 300 charge cycles before they are at 80% or less. 79% or less on an lli-ion iMpres battery is considered bad or end-of-life or needs replacement.

I don't think impres technology is all it's cracked up to be personally.... but it's nice to have a battery level display and mAh left on the battery.

No different than non-Impres, rule of thumb is 300 cycles for Li-Ion, 400-500 for NiMH and 600 for NiCD

On a Li-Ion Impres battery charged on an Impres charger I find
it difficult to ever reach a 100% charge level. OTOH, using the
old standard 8831 charger it runs up to 100% every time. Go figure.

I learned the following from our battery distributor

Li-ion = no memory - 300-400 charge cycles

NiMH - not as much of a memory - more charge cycles

NiCAD sucks

In any event, arent the IMPRESS chargers designed to condition batteries when necessary? in that event its a waste of money to get a Li-Ion IMPRESS battery.

Li-ion still needs conditioning, memory is not the only issue addressed in conditioning cycles but reduced capacity due to chemistry crystallization as well.

NiCD lasts forever and is the optimal chemistry for longevity if properly maintained. It is also the only chemistry that performs well in extreme temperature conditions.

Your battery distributor is evidently more interested in selling batteries than educating its customers. IMPRES has more benefits than simple automated conditioning. Try leaving a legacy battery on a legacy charger for a week and see what happens to the capacity.

Well. I purchase Li-Ion for EX600's that we give out to personnel because I will never be able to see them and condition them all. I figure the Li-Ion is the best way to go especially for people with nasty charging habbits?

In the future. I will stick to Ni-CAD impress batteries so that when a portable on the truck isnt removed from the charger for days at a time it will stay conditioned.

How bad are the batteries being screwed up on the older portables for sitting in the chargers for prolonged periods of time?

And does an impress charger do anything when a non impress battery is sitting charging for a long period of time as well?

Sadly Motorola has not seen fit to get the EX series an IMPRES battery. I guess the 3 engineers they have left in the US are too busy fixing firmware defects in the expert tier radios

NiCD are really underrated, the biggest problem was memory with them, and with IMPRES that problem is nullified. Also keep in mind the 2 year warranty on an IMPRES NiCD, it's 6 months longer than the standard NiCDs. They do have their drawbacks but every chemistry has its strengths and weaknesses. There's no "fits all" solution out there. Li-ion is about as close as you can get though to "fits all" and it fills its niche well. NiMH is a good in-between and I've got customers with date codes from 2003 and 2004 and the batteries still rate at 80-90% of factory capacity.

Non IMPRES batteries sitting on a charger will cook the chemistry. When a battery has high voltage the charger reverts to trickle charging, which still zaps some juice into the battery. Since the capacity is full, that extra energy gets dissipated as heat, which is what causes the damage to the paste inside the cells. IMPRES will actually cut off all charging to the battery and only "fill'er up" when capacity has been reduced to 95% or so.

However, this all assumes IMPRES battery and IMPRES charger. Replace either with non
IMPRES and you're back at square one-- no smart charging, just legacy charging.

That's not to say legacy solutions are not of value-- they simply require more planning and maintenance, but the lower cost of the non-IMPRES batteries/chargers is harder to justify when labor is so expensive these days.

Excellent!!! thanks for the detailed explanation. We are starting to replace the chargers in the vehicles with IMPRESS chargers, now its time to start spending the extra bucks on the batteries!!!

With the EX series, we would just buy new batteries, if they had an IMPRESS battery we wouldn't spend the money on IMPRESS chargers.

One of these days I'll have to do a full write up on the technical side of IMPRES, most of Motorola's material is marketing and buzzword driven and it's easy to get lost in the sales mumbo jumbo