To recalibrate your laptop, charge the device until the battery shows a hundred-percent charge, and then switch off the mains power and allow the laptop to run off the battery until the battery is entirely drained and the device shuts down.

You may have noticed that battery performance (in any device that uses batteries) tends to degrade from year to year. If you buy a laptop, and use it for around four years or so, you may notice that it needs to be charged twice as often as before. As a matter of fact, most of our upgrades in technology tend to be because the batteries we used in older technology have failed completely, and we hope for better efficiency in the new models.

When you look around you and see how many people simply get rid of old batteries that they think have failed, in the easiest way available to them, sometimes even (in the case of lead-acid batteries) paying people to come and take the batteries away, you realize that not many people know about reconditioning batteries. So, here are some things that people don't know about the reconditioning process.

Even if you buy the best quality batteries available on the market today, after a certain active life, quality is going to degrade, the battery will hold less and less charge, and will finally fail. At that point, you will have to go out and buy a new battery, which (of course) means profit for battery manufacturers, but money out of pocket for you.

While lithium-ion batteries are extremely efficient, and not too hazardous to the environment, the simple fact is that they can become dangerously unstable if they happen to be over-discharged. And when I mean dangerously unstable, I mean that they can cause fires and destroy equipment.

Oddly enough, one of the main reasons that a car's battery loses performance is quite simply, corrosion. Yes, I mean rust. No matter how well the internals of the battery work, if there is a considerable amount of corrosion on the terminals, it will interfere with the passage of electricity to the vehicle, and your battery is not going to perform adequately.

If your vehicle uses lead-acid batteries - and most vehicles do - you need to be very careful that the level of liquid inside the battery doesn't fall too much.

I'm going to tell you how to get the most out of your lithium-ion battery. For example, a person who uses a lithium-ion battery in a camera will often let the charge get down to zero before recharging the device. This is something that seriously degrades the performance of the battery, and you will find that after doing this for some time that your battery performance can degrade by as much as thirty percent.

Almost every device that we use today makes use of a battery to a lesser or greater extent. It goes without saying that most of these have a limited active life. This differs from battery to battery.

To understand just how reconditioning lead-acid batteries works, you need to fully understand just how the batteries themselves work. The lead-acid battery consists of plates of lead that are coated with lead oxide, and which are bathed in sulfuric acid.

It seems to be pretty much standard procedure to throw out an old battery that has gone dead. It's also rather an expensive procedure because it usually entails buying a brand new battery that is usually very expensive.

The most commonly used types of batteries today are the nickel-cadmium, the nickel-metal hydride, the lithium-ion, and the lead-acid battery. Each of these batteries is used in different applications.

The first skill that you need to develop when you get into the business of reconditioning batteries is the ability to analyze a battery and to figure out whether you should try to recondition it or leave it alone.

If you own golf carts, you know what a financial strain it is when their batteries fail and have to be replaced.

Lead-acid batteries are used everywhere because they don't cost much, relatively speaking, and can put out a large amount of energy for a sustained period of time. They are used in automobiles, of course, but they're also used in solar power installations, and to supply backup power. They weigh a lot, and tend to have a shorter lifespan than other categories of batteries.