Customer Reviews

Ultralast UL-VALCHK Multi-Voltage Wall and Car NiMH/NiCd Charger Kit

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I bought this today and charged up two pairs of nimh aaa battery for 7 hours. The battery seems to work well for me, however, I'm not too sure about the batteries advertised 1000mah rating for the aaa. I haven't used the AA yet.

The package comes with three chargers - one travel charger, one usb charger, and one cigarette lighter charger. Two of the charger's LED are used only as a power led and it will ONLY turn off if you unplug it. So don't wait for it to turn off to tell you the batteries are charged. It probably does not have overcharge protection so I would only charge it for about 8 hours then unplug the charger and consider yourself done.
In terms of batteries, the package comes with 4 AAA and 4 AA.

I plan on buying the Energizer e2 rechargeable nimh and compare it with these. The Energizer AAA is rated at 850mah, but I have a hunch they are right at 850mah whereas these ultralast AAA will measure less then their advertise capacity. Why am I saying this? Look at all the reviews on amazon about these batteries. They are overrated. I must say though that so far I'm prefectly happy. They are much better than the duracel alkaline batteries I was using in my high drain digial hero 3 camera/camcorder.

The batteries perform just fine, and it's nice that they come with so many chargers to choose from, however there are a few things about the chargers that bug me.

I got these batteries for travel, so space and weight are important. The wall charger can accommodate four batteries at once, but it's quite large and heavy. What's worse is that the prongs are fixed on the back and can't be folded in, giving the charger an unusual shape. For this reason I decided just to bring the USB charger, as it could plug into either a computer or my iphone charger, and it's quite lightweight. I didn't even bother with the car charger.

The USB charger works fine, and has LED lights to indicate that it's plugged in and charging the batteries. The unforgivable design flaw of it is that the LED light doesn't turn off or change colors when the batteries are DONE charging, which makes it pretty much just guesswork, so I either leave the batteries plugged in for too long or not long enough. Big disappointment. It has a small part that flips down so it can fit AA or AAA batteries, but the lack of an indicator LED is really annoying. Given the option, I would probably not purchase this set again due to the design of the chargers. Might be good for people who don't care about the size or shape of their chargers, or knowing exactly when their batteries are done charging.