Thread: Battery charger - NITECORE SC4 - Recommended

On my last 4 day/3 night rabbit hunt, I was getting rather frustrated with early 'power outages' on my torches using pairs of 18650's. I was actually beginning to question my torch circuitry since I couldn't get much more than 15 minutes before the lights would fail. Now I'm just a dumb ingineer and not a clever electrical technician, so my solution was to tape my spare head torch to the rifle stock and use my spare cabled 18650 quad packs. Problem solved!

One of the guys on the trip was using single battery lights, and was using a Nitecore charger (cant recall the model), but it had a whole lot of charging information on the screen. So, when I got home I decided to have a look at what was available.
After searching out Aliexpress, I decided to purchase a NITECORE SC4 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Hot-...311.0.0.RK6MSS
So the charger arrived last week, and yesterday I cycled all of my batteries through. Found 3 of 12 that the charger rated as "POOR" in terms of internal resistance. After charging them up, I put them into a single cell torch, and sure enough, after 3-4 minutes, the low voltage indicator LED on the torch started flashing.

This charger is great. You get a whole host of charging information come up on the screen, and you can select which battery to view ant any point in time, and you can easily identify dud cells - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Originally Posted by hotbarrels

On my last 4 day/3 night rabbit hunt, I was getting rather frustrated with early 'power outages' on my torches using pairs of 18650's. I was actually beginning to question my torch circuitry since I couldn't get much more than 15 minutes before the lights would fail. Now I'm just a dumb ingineer and not a clever electrical technician, so my solution was to tape my spare head torch to the rifle stock and use my spare cabled 18650 quad packs. Problem solved!

One of the guys on the trip was using single battery lights, and was using a Nitecore charger (cant recall the model), but it had a whole lot of charging information on the screen. So, when I got home I decided to have a look at what was available.
After searching out Aliexpress, I decided to purchase a NITECORE SC4 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Hot-...311.0.0.RK6MSS
So the charger arrived last week, and yesterday I cycled all of my batteries through. Found 3 of 12 that the charger rated as "POOR" in terms of internal resistance. After charging them up, I put them into a single cell torch, and sure enough, after 3-4 minutes, the low voltage indicator LED on the torch started flashing.

This charger is great. You get a whole host of charging information come up on the screen, and you can select which battery to view ant any point in time, and you can easily identify dud cells - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

I like the Nitecore stuff, been running their D4 4 cell charger for a few years now, bloody good.

Can charge 18650 li-ion and AA or AAA ni-mh at the same time too.

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Great, but that would p*ss you off when you find you have dud batteries eh, I'm sure some of mine are dud, my torches do the same thing sometimes. They're not cheap, quite frustrating. Just bought one of these ... thanks for the advice.

Originally Posted by JoshC

Great, but that would p*ss you off when you find you have dud batteries eh, I'm sure some of mine are dud, my torches do the same thing sometimes. They're not cheap, quite frustrating. Just bought one of these ... thanks for the advice.

Far less pissed off finding out which ones are duds ahead of the hunt than when I am out in the field surrounded by zombie rabbits and having to piss around changing out batteries, only to find that one of the pair I just put in must be a dud as well
That said, I have no right to complain as the duds are probably 8-9 years old

Yep very true. Going to be good to see what the go is with mine!!

I have the D4. I bought it after my simple, two battery i2 charger died unexpectedly and after not much use. Happy with the D4 so far.

I had a Nitecore was crap and stopped working chucked it away now I have an Xtar vc4 yup has all the info on the screen has been replaced under warrantee which was good but now the replacement is showing sign of crapping out as well all this Chinese rubbish seems to be form over function good luck with whatever you get. Keep the receipt!

use a Nitecore D4, reckon it is brilliant

not sure if there is any science to this, but did a test to see if i could charge my 18650's full with the old charger (supplied by Maxtoch) and then put them in the D4. it showed they had about 3/4 charge on the indicator and kept charging for about another half hour before finishing. not sure if it squeezes in a bit of extra juice or not but feels that way...