I would like to personally welcome Battery Mooch to MoochReviews.com
“Mooch” is well known in the industry as the “battery guy” and is quite popular on the ECF.
Although I have some experience with battery testing, Mooch has all the experience I lack so I though it a good fit to offer him another place in internet to publish his articles.
Who is Battery Mooch?
My name is John Muchow, some of you may know me as Mooch on ECF and FB and Mooch315 on ECR.
I have been vaping since April, 2015 and haven’t smoked once since I
started!
I was born and raised in New York City and still live there now. Since 1992 I have been designing and building electronic devices for a large number of clients. My first products were camera remote-control systems for sports photographers. As these systems, and other devices, transitioned from wired to wireless the performance of the batteries they used was very important as there was no way to replace them during use. This led to me doing more and more battery testing and developing the electronics to charge, test, and protect them.
As battery technology advanced, from NiCd to NiMH to Li-Ion and now
ultracapacitor/Li-Ion hybrids, the devices I built and the battery testing I did
advanced along with them. I started specializing in power management electronics; battery chargers, energy harvesters (for charging from heat, light, or vibration/movement), power supplies, battery analyzers, electronic loads for battery discharging, and battery management/protection systems. This is the work I still do today.
My clients have included the US Army, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated,
Eastman Kodak Company, and hundreds of other companies from large to small. Part of the work I’ve done for a lot of my clients has been battery testing. Sometimes they want to recommend a good battery to their customers. Other times they’re batteries I have chosen to combine with my electronics to form a complete, protected power source for them to incorporate into their products.
Depending on my client’s requirements this testing can take up to several weeks to complete. I use a subset of these tests when evaluating the batteries we use when vaping. This includes continuous-current tests to establish the battery’s true (and safe) ratings. They also help to determine if there’s any risk of venting if one of our mods autofires or a mechanical mod’s button is accidentally pressed. The pulse-current tests measure the degree of voltage sag we would see when vaping at different current levels. Both types of tests are done the same way for every set of batteries I test.
This consistency in the testing allows for direct comparison of the performance of different batteries even if the pulse discharging I do doesn’t match the way you vape.
Safety is my number one priority. While I often test at discharge current levels
that can result in unsafe battery temperatures, this is the only way to figure out what a battery’s true and safe ratings are. No battery is totally safe but we can certainly avoid taking unnecessary risks.
My blog at ECF has the results of all my testing and a few articles on batteries,
battery safety, etc.:
ECF Forum
I have also listed the equipment I use and the steps I follow when testing. This
allows anyone to replicate my tests if they want to:
Testing Gears
Testing Process
My battery test results offer you a resource you can use when choosing a battery
that will not only be safer for the way you vape but will also give you great
performance.
Mooch
