Battery Experience in the UK, Australia, and other places

[Steve Pendergrast]

Hello Vorpal Community,

For those of you outside the USA, especially Australia and the UK, I was wondering if you could help me out by letting me know what brands of 18650 batteries you're using.

A little background:

In the USA we are fortunate to have easy access to very inexpensive EBL 3000 mAh "white top" batteries. These are by far the best 18650 batteries we've found for Vorpal the Hexapod (and I've tried about 10 different brands). We typically get 70 to 80 minutes of runtime in "demo mode", and that mode is pretty hard on the robot, as it performs a large number of battery hungry tricks with very little rest time.  You can get two of these with a charger for $12.99 on Amazon right now, with free shipping if  you have amazon prime. That's frankly a ridiculously low price for a battery that can be recharged a thousand times and has the kind of capacity we're talking about here.

However, I'm hearing that people in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and many other parts of the world can't really get this brand at a reasonable price.

Unfortunately, this leads a lot of people to choose very cheap "no name" Chinese batteries of dubious quality. In many cases these batteries vastly overstate their ratings. I bought one just for laughs once, it claimed 11,000 mAh which I think may well be impossible for this size battery. Testing got me 15 minutes of run time, indicating it's more like 800 mAh, more than a factor of 10 overstatement!

So I would like to throw the question out there:  For those of you outside the USA, especially the UK and Australia/NZ, what source and brand of 18650 batteries have you found that work well with Vorpal the Hexapod?

Thanks in advance!