Thank you, Longus Catus, for all your work. I was thinking about buying an extended battery for my SG S3. From your previous postings, it seems like GG has the best deal so far. I will probably go for GG and try it out. Regarding the small difference in your testing, could it be the deviation in the testing tools?
I'm not sure what you're asking but I'll take it that you want to know more information about what happened. Some of the events are still unfolding, but I'll go into detail about every part...the good and the bad.
I use a CBA-III, a CBA-IV, and a CBA Charger for my manual and automated battery tests. CBA unimaginatively stands for computerized battery analyzer. I got them all from westmountainradio.com (I have no sort of affiliation with them.)
I had noticed that on some tests, they started out with strange readings, and other tests that put the battery capacity much lower than I expected. After redoing these tests, they became higher and higher until some batteries matched their advertised capacities and put the case on the back burner. I still noticed some tests had strange transients at the start, but I couldn't figure it out.
Since I was out of ideas, I contacted the CBA support team about the strange readings at the start of some tests. They said it was strange but hadn't seen it before. Ten days or so later, by a stroke of good luck, I (whether intentionally or not, I'm not certain) wiggled the battery analyzer part of a cable that connects it and the battery, and I looked at the chart and saw that I had created a disturbance.
I updated the CBA support and said that I was going to clean out the contacts with a q-tip and an abrasive cleaner (to gauge their response to see if I was going to do something stupid or not) and I asked if they had seen problems similar to that before. (That being erroneous readings when the cable is wiggled). They said occasionally, but the complaints had been resolved by replacing the cable.
So I cleaned out the contacts, one by one, with q-tips. Once I cleaned the contacts, I plugged everything in and wiggled the cable and saw that there were no disturbances/transients! That was great news figuring out the main problem. Also, the voltage drop or sag was considerably reduced with the clean contacts.
I contacted the CBA support team and included before and after pictures and told them of what I've said here, and further said that nothing about my environment or testing is particularly atypical and there are probably other people having problems and don't even know it. So I asked them to look into it.
During this time and the time I got a response back from the CBA support team, I had learned that the Powerpole (by Anderson) contacts are silver plated! This is fantastic for ensuring that the lowest possible resistance connection is made for any cables that use the Powerpole connector, but terrible if you don't know beforehand and don't properly clean the contacts before use. Once I got a response, they said that the dropbox link I sent was password protected (oops) and send them the images in the email.
I haven't gotten a response back from them yet about that. This is when I started retesting all the batteries and made the newest charts above. Now before every test I started to wiggle everything I could while checking the chart to make sure that no transients show up. And for the most part, they were gone since the cleaning. But there were still occasionally minuscule (maybe like 0.02v) glitches that I could create - much better than the large disruptions pre-cleaning.
Then I decided I had to solder every non-Powerpole connection to ensure a consistent and good contact and reliable test results. I also calibrated one battery analyzer to compensate for the resistance in the cables (one CBA has a direct battery connection, the other goes through the CBA Charger, and from there to the CBA, a fair amount of cable) used by measuring the voltage at the battery and at the battery analyzer and the CBA software did some calculations and adjusted the voltage reading. I did that tonight.
I think getting accurate results is very important if I am going to be giving advice on what people should and shouldn't buy. I've done everything I know this far to fix the problems I've found. I've also ordered silver cleaner so I can make sure the contacts for every Powerpole connector I use are as clean as possible. Some the things I did I probably should have done sooner.
That's pretty much all there is to say about it... Now, for some pictures... here is one before/after picture pair:
CBA3 before:
CBA3 after:
I only have a before pic of one of the cables. I think I made this one...
And a less dramatic example (This is how it was shipped to me):
Notice in the cable connector pictures, you can see the start of a wide cleaning started by the scraping of the connectors as they are inserted into one another. This is called 'self wiping' and you can see it's better than nothing (since you can see the wide wipe) but it takes a whole lot more than that to clean off that major tarnish.
That's it!
