Electrical – recharging 18V battery back in parallel

batteryelectrical

So I'm working on a project where I'm wanting to take several 18V ryobi battery packs, put them in parallel to increase the capacity, and then use that to power my project. I think this should be fairly easily done, but my problem is when I want to recharge them, I don't want to disconnect them and charge them individually. Would it be alright to just take a single battery charger, and connect it to all of the battery packs in parallel? I wasn't sure if this would damage anything or not. I'm sure it would take longer to charge, but i'm okay with that.

Anyways, just thought I'd ask people that would know more about this than I would. Thanks!

Best Answer

Checking yonder google tells me that it's difficult and unwise for NiCd: http://www.powerstream.com/NiCd.htm, and unlikely to work for Lithium batteries unless you match the internal cells very carefully: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/126673/charging-li-ion-batteries-in-parallel.

Either one could be overcome, but not for the minimal expense of just buying a cheap lawn tractor battery from Walmart, and putting a trickle charger on it.