Lii-500 Charger, and review
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/02/03
Via [Wayback/Archive] Jilles🏳️🌈 on Twitter: “Recycling old laptop batteries ” / Twitter, I ended up at this great in depth review [Wayback/Archive] Review of Charger LiitoKala Engineer Lii-500, including graphs of behaviour with various battery types and counts.
The site has many other reviews. Not just about [Wayback/Archive] Batteries and chargers (and a great overview at [Wayback/Archive] Round cell charger index). The main page is named [Wayback/Archive] Flashlight information, but shows links to lists of articles about batteries, chargers, multimeters, flashlights, projects and more.
So this is my list of things to try: [Wayback/Archive] Lii-500 Charger:
The chargers compatible with Li-Ion batteries are all [Wayback/Archive] NITECORE based (most of which also support NiMH and NiCd):
- [Wayback/Archive] Review of Charger Nitecore Digicharger D4 (my second one – the first one was blown up by a faulty Eneloop battery – has been in use for 8+ years now; it supports both NiMH and NiCd next to Li-Ion)
Conclusion
The charger does a good charging on both LiIon, LiFePO4 and NiMH.
The charge can be used for 26650 cells, but are not ideal for it, I would have liked the slots 2 mm longer, some protected 26650 are rather long.
I like the display, but it is a bit technical to look at and it only shows data for one channel at a time.The D4 is a good universal charger and the low mode makes it better for small cells than the i4. Charging two batteries is reasonable fast, but four batteries requires some patience.
- [Wayback/Archive] Review of Charger Nitecore SC4 (started to use recently as it supports higher currents; next to Li-Ion, also supports NiMH and NiCd)
Conclusion
The charger is very good when charging LiIon, but the silent halving of charge current when time sharing it not that nice.
For NiMH is works perfectly with 2000mAh eneloops, but the high capacity cells are terminated premature, again it has the lower charge current when time sharing.
The internal resistance do not really work when testing it.
The mAh display is not that precise in all situations and faulty when charging 4 batteries.
The usb charger output works fine, but cannot deliver the rated current. The current is fine compared to the coding of the usb.Due to the different problems I will only rate the charger as fairly good.
- [Wayback/Archive] Review of Nitecore LC10 (started to use recently as travel-only charger; Li-Ion only)
Conclusion
The charger is very compact and can charger LiIon batteries and be used as a power bank. It is not perfect for either application, but can definitely be used as a compact travel charger.The charger cannot maintain full charge speed with good batteries when they are empty and it do not really terminated charging, but just reduces current. It will work with a solar panel. The usb output is a bit low power at 1A and has good coding.
I will call it fairly good as a travel charger, but not as a regular charger.
I have considered [Wayback/Archive] Review of Nitecore UMS4 (which supports both NiMH and NiCd next to Li-Ion) but for now I would rather try out the LiitoKala:
Conclusion
Generally the charger works well, but the default LiIon current (2A) is mostly for high current batteries, it is possible to select a lower current with some button presses. There is also the detail about time sharing, this means with 3 or 4 batteries in the charger the current is halved.
The internal resistance measurement do not work very well.I will rate the charger as fairly good.
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
Leave a Reply