Batteries and Patios
Batteries
Because I did a fair bit of flash photography in the past I have acquired quite a large collection of rechargeable batteries. These days I mostly use Eneloops, and they’re all fairly new and work well, but I also have a lot of old basic nimhs that are probably all over a decade old. I always kept them in sets, but as some died, or just reached the point where they wouldn’t hold a usable amount of charge the sets would end up with three or even two batteries, which isn’t a whole lot of use. Eventually I bought a charger that can analyse the batteries and I made up new sets and threw the out the worst ones. Every so often I do some maintenance (i.e. charge them up), just to make sure they don’t drain to zero and die, so this week I pulled them out and set about it.
It turns out some of my batteries have got much worse since I last used them.
The charger has a ‘refresh’ mode, so I’ve been using that and running the batteries through several refresh runs seems to improve them significantly. Except for one. This one battery was discharging all of 4mAh before the refresh cycle gave up. Last time I checked it it held 1758mAh. That’s quite a drop.
I’ve dropped the charge rate down to 0.5A, which it seems is very not good for batteries with capacities of 1500mAh or more, but it does seem to help with this particular one. I’ll try running it through the refresh cycle a few times before I decide whether to bin it or not.
…and Patios
The garden at the side of my flat is all paved with that ‘monoblock’ stuff. Little coloured bricks. It was done before I moved in, and it’s quite a large area. It’s a massive pain because it just looks dirty all the time. I don’t much want to pay people to clean it, because I’m cheap and don’t care that much about how it looks, but my neighbour has some too, and he likes to clean it, and the shared portion (we have a shared path), and that makes my bit look worse.
I’ve finally got fed up with it and pulled out a bucket and brush and have given it a good scrub with washing up liquid and warm water and it’s beginning to look reasonable. The trouble is it generates a lot of mud (not as much as my neighbour’s pressure washer, oh boy does that create a lot of mud) and washing it away with buckets of water filled up in my flat is not sustainable.
I ended up asking my neighbour if I could use his hose and outdoor tap and he was OK with that, but the hose barely reaches round my side of the building. That was enough though. Yesterday evening I set it running, flooded the place, and then brushed the muddy water away down to a flower bed.
In the image you can (hopefully) see where I’ve cleaned and where I’ve not yet. I figure this is a reasonable approach. It’s quite easy to just fill up a bucket with soapy water and clean a bit, so I can sort it out bit by bit as I feel like it, and I’ve ordered some extra hose bits so I can join an old hose I have in my shed to my neighbour’s hose, which should make the whole thing pretty easy.
What an exciting week it’s been! 😆