Finding bad battery cells in a battery pack.
 

I really didnt know how to search for this but here goes. I have a couple of dead battery packs (an Elite 1500mah NIMH and an Elite 5000mah NIMH packs) and i was wondering how i could find out which cell are the bad cells? I would like to find the bad cells and replace them.

thats a good ?i always threw mine away

Yea i heard someone has done it here....i cant remember who...im sure there is a way to figure it out. I mean how to use a volt meter or something to find the bad cells.

Remove the heat shrink and test each cell with a volt/multi meter...you should have enough room to get the meter pins between each cell.

+1 "thumbsup"

place the positive lead (red)on the pos end of each cell and negative lead (black) to the neg end. a bad cell will be out of the range of the good cells,,,example 1.2--1.4---1.23----0.93< bad cell---1.1---1.6

the bad cell or cells will be different from the good ones,,usually with lesser voltage showing,,you can also make a load lead with a tail light bulb from a 1:1 car ie: 1157 bulb which you put in line between the meter lead and one side of the battery cells,,this will be a little more accurate if you dont find something pretty easy the other way

Also, if you use your battery pack and one cell becomes much hotter than the rest (in temperature), that would be your bad cell. This happened to me in the past. To replace a cell, you would need to find one with the same capacity as the rest of the pack. I didn't have one, so I turned a 7 cell into a 6 cell (not ideal, but usable).

That's the answer I was looking for. What setting do I put the voltmeter on?

Your voltmeter should be set to DC Volts. If you voltmeter does not have auto-ranging, then set it for the lowest setting at or above 2 volts. Look for the one cell that is different than the others.

Sweet thanks a bunch for all the info! "thumbsup"