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bios battery replacements

E

Elvi

Experienced Member
Joined
Nov 23, 2011
Messages
275
Location
Munsala, Finland
Today i thought i'd go thrue a few of my old computers and look on how the battery looks and some are leaking others not charging and that stuff, the leaking ones i'd like to change but the question is how, most of them look like a small barrel and are soldered on the mobo itself.

Are there any way to switch these batteries to say a normal 2032 battery like most comps of today use or is that a bad idea.
Was thinking i'd solder some wires to one of those batteries and attach them to the mobo if that is even possible.
 
i've found the pins on the holders of the 2032 batteries often match the holes the battery goes into, when you solder, watch which side is plus and minus, also alot of older boards have a 4 pin connecter usually next or near the battery that allows for an external battery. For those you can use an old rechargeable phone battery
 
One thing not mentioned explicitly is to determine if the battery you're replacing is a rechargeable one. Simply replacing a 3.6V NiCd with a 3.6V Lithium will lead to grief--lithium primary cells aren't rechargeable and react badly (boom!) if you try to charge them.

You can employ a blocking diode if you want to make that substitution, to prevent the motherboard from trying to charge a lithium.

Most clock chips will work just fine down to about 2.5V, so a 3.6V lithium with a Schottky diode in series leaves plenty of margin for discharge.
 
Well i have this samsung spc3000v that had a leaking soldered battery and no battery pinns, i broke off the battery, the minus pin went completely off right down to the mobo but the + leg was left behind heh but as theres not much stuff around that place i don't think it will be a problem to replace when i find one.

Are NiMh rechargeable batteries usable for this you think? they seem to be the same size also the same voltage.
 
Generally, yes, you can use NiMH batteries where you use NiCd. In this application, I doubt that there will be any particular advantage, other than RoHS because both will self-discharge faster than the clock circuit will discharge them.

If this is a system that you're going to leave unpowered for months, you may want to consider a lithium battery.
 
Is it possible that some of the barrel-type batteries were not rechargeable? So far I've seen two "types" of such batteries - some (usually green) show heavy leakage and I always replaced them with coin-like holders with lithium CR2032s (none exploded so far, they don't even get warm), while the others (usually blue) are very clean, have "RECHARGE" engraved on one end and still seem to hold BIOS information at least over a few days...
 
well i've ripped out 2 that i've found so far and they are blue and very leaky, glad it didn't damage my samsung 8088.
just wonder how i should go about that one when it doens't have battery pinns if i go the lithium way.
 
okay i can't seem to wrap my head around this battery issue, as i'm typing i've found 5 computers with leaking nicd batteries and i honestly don't know what to do except removing these batteries and if i even should add new ones, i proberly won't use these computers much except for a very few for tests.
the easiest would proberly just be to replace these batteries with a similair one note most of these computers don't have any battery pinns.

i'm trying to figure out the cheapest way to do this, either new similair batteries or maybe some lithium type i really don't know and it's starting to give me a headacke.
 
i can't find any nicd batteries anywhere i've looked only nimh and it's a shop 70km away but they cost 2.95 euros a piece :|

wondering if it just would be easier to just get som cr2032 coin batteries and add wires to them and then to the mobo...
 
If you're replacing an NiCd, you'll need to add a blocking diode to avoid charging the lithium cell. A silicon diode drops between 0.6-0.7 volts. Since a CR2032 is 3.0V, you'd need 2 with a diode to replace a 3.6V NiCd.

This might be another option.

It seems that most of the battery suppliers on ebay.fi are in the UK. Very strange...

Do you plan to visit Russia anytime soon? ebay.ru has some nice prices.
 
Well ebay is out of the question, i almost never buy stuff online except some computer stuff from pc shops thats the extent of that and no no trips on the horrison besides that i don't travel, longest i've ever been is to sweden and that's many years ago when i was in school.

Oh i think i know why that ebay is in the uk, that's cause there is no ebay in this country.

Also i don't have any way to shop online as i don't own a creditcard :p
 
A litle here and there dependent on what i need, normal batteries (AA, AAA) are almost everywhere but barrel batteries are almost nowhere, mobile phone batteries in a city like 40km away, but cheap batteries... that you can pretty much forget...
Some like the CR2032 can be found in a small store in the next city.
 
Well, in that case, I'd go with a 3-AA-cell battery holder and a blocking diode. 3 alkaline cells will give you about 4.5 volts, with the blocking diode, you get 3.8V, close enough for this kind of thing. So you have to acquire a diode (any inexpensive silicon rectifier, such as 1N4001 will do; the battery holder and 3 AA cells.
 
Elvi said:
...mobile phone batteries in a city like 40km away, but cheap batteries... that you can pretty much forget...
Click to expand...
In case there's a language misunderstanding about "mobile phone", we're talking about a battery pack like the ones below for cordless phones (the kind you use in the house) and not cell phones (like you use in your car and build at Nokia). Here in North America you can buy those pretty well everywhere for one or two dollars, whereas cell phone batteries are much more expensive.

PhoneBats.JPG
 
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