Choosing the best battery Chargers for the WII Remote

Choosing the best battery Chargers for the WII Remote

You have the WII and you have your rechargeable batteries, but how do you maintain power in your batteries? Easy! By getting a battery charger. In this post, I’ll share what I know on battery chargers.

Battery Chargers are the things you need when you want to charge your Ni-MH and Ni-CD batteries.

Please do not try to recharge normal (alkaline batteries). It is not effective and there is a risk of explosion.

One thing you should know about battery chargers is that, some are dumb and some are smart. So what’s the difference?

Dumb chargers simply charge the hell out of your battery regardless if it is full or not. They are not capable of doing anything but charge batteries. Imagine water flowing from the faucet filling up a pail of water. You have to manually turn it off when it is full and you should be blind and deaf in which you can only guess when it is full or not. On the other hand, smart chargers are chargers that has more functions. They are able to detect if a battery is full and would stop charging them.

So we would obviously need some smart chargers and not dumb ones. (the first charger I bought was a dumb charger and that was when I did not doresearch but just bought impulsively).

Features to look for in a smart charger.

• Slots – how many batteries can you charge at a time? Also make sure that the slots work individually, avoid those chargers that need pairs to charge
• Speed in charging – Normal charging of a 2100 mAh battery takes around 14 hours (stated in manual), but some can charge them faster. Some even claims to charge them in 15 minutes. Look for a charger that is not too fast (1 hour or so) but not too long (more than 10 hours). My own preference is that it can fully recharge your batteries in just 5-6 hours. Also note that the higher mAh your batteries have, the higher time you need to fully charge it.
• LED – the light is on when charging, it is off when it doesn’t
• Discharge feature (optional) – This enables you to do a reset of your battery by draining it to 0 then recharging it to full. Gets rid of memory effect.
• Trickle effect – maintains battery in full as long as the charger is on
• “I’m already full” detection – this is what makes chargers smart!
• No Timers – Smart Chargers do not rely on timers to know when a battery is fully charged or not. Timers are set to turn off the charger after a specific time.

How to test if a charger is smart?

Charge a battery to full then take a poop. Try to charge it again and see if the LED in the charging lits up. If it does, it is not smart. If it doesn’t, either you have a defective LED or it is smart!

Example of Smart Battery Chargers (Brands)

• Sanyo Refresh Quick Charger – 4slots / individual charging, discharge feature, I’m already full detection, 6-8hours charging. This is what I have currently
• GP Chargers
• Energizer
• Duracell
• Powerbase

More brands to come soon but unlike batteries, you can buy one and be happy with it.

Budget should be around$15-$30 only. I know that there are chargers that are more expensive and carries more features but it is an overkill already for me. A simple smart charger should suffice your wii.

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