Anybody used the AccuPower IQ 338 Battery Analyzer?

OK, obviously your West Mountain Radio CBA is a superior battery analyzer. But for us guys that want to know the answer to a simple question: "Are these weird batteries I [bought on Ebay] [yanked out of used power tools] [etc] OK?" This looks like a great tool.

Tests 18650's, and some other stuff.

$38 on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013HP4N70/ref=ask_ql_qh_dp_hza, User's manual here http://www.accupower.at/media/accupower_manual_iq338.pdf The unit is a charger, but also has a capacity mode that will charge a battery, discharge it all the way, then charge it back up and report the capacity, either with a fast discharge or slow discharge. You get a number, not a nice graph that you'd get with a real CBA. But for a lot of us, a number is all we need.

I'm gonna get one of these, to test these weird batteries I bought on ebay. Wish me luck, and here's hoping I didn't get ripped off.

Anyone else tried this tester?

I've tried the tester on some NiMH's I had laying about. Haven't recieved my 18650's yet to try.

I think this is a great little tool. You can set it up with a discharge current of up to 1000 mA for 4 batteries at a time, it reports final charge voltage, final charge mAh, and battery impedance in milliohms (reported as mR) .

I don't have a way to independantly verify its accuracy. So far many of the batteries I've tested (All old NiMH's so far) have tested lower than their rated capacity, except for one, which reported higher. I am retesting that one to see how consistent the readings are, I'll retest some others as well to look for consistency.

I'll recieve 300 18650's soon. The tester is slow enough that it take a couple of hours to go through a full test, so the best I can hope for is to statistically sample the batteries I am getting, and test all of them for voltage.

This tester is cheap enough, and handy for charging other types of batteries, that it is useful to have around just as a charger. I could almost pop for a couple of them to slog through a higher statistical sample of my battery set. Or should I set up a program to test all of them 100%? I certainly want to test a sample rapidly while the DOA warranty is still in effect from my supplier.

You might consider testing all cells that have off-normal resting voltages or anything else that raises suspicion, and as you already plan - test a sampling of the rest.

I've never used that charger but a similar one, its good for capacity checking your 18650. But that one only discharges at 500ma, a 2000mah battery will take 4 hours to discharge. The only one that discharges at 1 amp is the opus btc 3100. If you got lot of batteries to test you'll end buying more chargers, I got 3 total. You can't have too many.

Just make sure after you fully charge a battery to 4.20 volts, wait 2 to 3 hours and check the voltage again. those that drop too much put them aside, they only good for flashlights. Only use batteries that maintain voltage in building battery packs. Weak batteries will give you balancing problems.

Thanks for the good info, Y'All. This tester is apparently the same as the Llitokala tester - at least the specs and user interface and case are the same.

https://us.gearbest.com/chargers/pp_228907.html

So far I've sampled about 30 for mass on a good gram scale, all test within spec for weight. That's a key way to identify fakes.
The guy has an an entire test bench filled up with Llitokala testers in his FB page, which seems pretty legit.

https://www.facebook.com/NEWAGECOMEDY?hc_ref=ART7fflXtuygDX5kebbAJ_p1c8_rCoSLSSXJTUgVLjl6fscV3npF-c2WXE_s5QJFl9Q&fref=nf&pnref=story

Halfway through tests on the first four, but already several batts have almost come up to spec on capacity. I'll go through and sample a number of them for resting voltage.

[EDIT] so far 37 of 300 have failed on voltage < 2.5V and a number have suspicious voltages <3.6V. A few also have suspicious corrosion.
They should have left the guy's shop fully charged if he capacity tested them like he says. Still, 59% appear to be good to go, which means I still got a hella deal on about half the batteries that I need. Hmmm. Better do more capacity tests and voltage tests after a charge and a rest.

llile said:

I think this is a great little tool.

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I think it's overpriced. Charging at 0.3-1.0A and discharging at 0.5A is way too modest for today. Check out Miboxer C2-4000 which offers charging/discharging at 0.1-1.5A with wide choice of current value.