Do you refresh?

If the answer is yes then this might seem like the most obvious piece of advice ever, but do you refresh your camera's batteries?

Not every battery charger has a refresh feature but if yours does then you should be using it. As far as I understand it, the idea is that it drains the battery's charge way beyond what happens with normal use, so when you recharge the battery it will be able to hold the charge for longer.

Before I started refreshing my batteries it had reached the point that I was charging four of them every day and they were all exhausted by the evening. A single battery would last for maybe half a football match. A battery used for a quick job early in the morning would be showing low charge by the beginning of the next job an hour later. If a battery wasn't used at all that day, and wasn't recharged the next morning, it wouldn't make it through the first job of the day.

Since I started refreshing my batteries I can usually charge all five on a Sunday afternoon and they'll see me right through the week. In a really busy week I'll need to recharge two of them by Wednesday.

Canon's recommended refresh rate is once per month if you're using the batteries extensively every day, so I would imagine it would be the same for other brands.