[L473ncy]

According to my mom you actually can't tell how much "juice" (amperage) is left in a battery without some weird setup or something like that. You CAN however, get a *general idea* of how much juice there is left if you take a multimeter and test for voltage obviously this isn't really an accurate way of testing but that's what we do at home.

Really, how much is a battery worth for your time? Obviously $50 is a lot of money, I'm not saying it isn't but if you have a smart charger it will extend the life of the battery and instead of 100 charge/discharge cycles you might now get 200 charge/discharge cycles out of it.

Now IRT to the OP's question. According to my mom as well, NiCD, although it is more susceptible to the "memory effect" than a more "modern" battery chemistry (ie. NiMH) it's not really much to worry about (anymore). As well, the newer NiCD cells are actually supposed to be better at negating the memory effect and the real problem people have is actually *OVERCHARGING* the batteries (not a big deal if you have a smartcharger that cuts power after it tells the battery is fully charged up) so that's a better reason to toss out that dumb wallcharger. If you must use a wallcharger though do some math and set a timer (ie. charging rate and battery capacity to figure out how long it is until the battery is fully charged then you physically disconnect it).

PS: If you're doing a "fast charge" it's actually defined as charging at 1C or more. 1C will give you a charge time of 1 hour (and a bit to compensate for inefficiencies in the charger). It's best to charge a .5C or less ("slow charge") but 1C isn't really bad or anything.