On February 2, 2007 at 11:42, splogue said...
Lithium-Ion batteries have a two year shelf life, so I
want to make sure I can get batteries on the open market
without having to request it as a part from URC (even
if they are very nice about it!).
Sean
Don't know where you heard this "Folklore". But I assure you that it is wrong.
I specialize in electronics for Fuel Gauging, Charging, and Protection of Batteries. I deal with Lithium-Ion and Lithium Polymer daily. I would only be worried about shelf life of these batteries if they were being stored at higher than room temperature for extended periods of time (multiple months).
Note that shelf life is different than use in real life. In real life, I would expect to get about 400 full discharge cycles. (Most decent cells will give you about 80% of the original runtime after about 300 cycles.) Note that wear out of Lithium based cells is a funtion of total Amp-Hours of discharge. So if you discharge to 50%, I would expect about 800 cycles, etc.
