About this replacement
NiKon D7000 — 7.4V Li-ion Battery Grip Replacement Battery (EN-EL15A)
This is a 7.4V, 3200mAh Li-ion replacement for the NiKon EN-EL15A, built for use in battery grips on the D7000 DSLR. Two of these cells slot into a compatible grip to extend shooting capacity and enable vertical shutter control. Capacity figures come from product data — 3200mAh, 23.68Wh per cell.
- D7000 grip slot compatibility: The D7000 and its compatible grips authenticate each battery slot independently. Both cells must pass the BMS handshake on their respective contacts — a failure in one slot does not affect the other, but vertical shutter control requires both slots to be occupied and above minimum voltage.
- Bench tested on actual hardware: We ran this cell through charge and discharge cycles in a dual-slot grip configuration. The BMS communicated charge state correctly to the camera body, and the grip recognised both slots without a compatibility warning on the D7000 menu.
- Dual-slot starting charge: Insert both cells at the same state of charge when loading a grip. The grip draws from whichever cell reads lower first — a large mismatch at insertion means one cell hits cutoff voltage well before the other, shortening the effective capacity of the pair.
Why the D7000 grip drains one battery faster than the other
Grip electronics poll both cells and pull current from the lower-voltage slot first. If two cells start at different charge levels, that slot carries the full load until it matches the second cell's voltage — by which point it has already lost a significant portion of its charge lead. Over repeated cycles, this imbalance compounds: the first cell ages faster because it absorbs more charge cycles than the second. The fix is simple — charge both cells fully before inserting them together.
Grip vertical shutter fires no shots despite half-charged batteries
The vertical shutter release on D7000-compatible grips requires both battery slots to be occupied and each cell to read above the grip's minimum operating voltage threshold. If one slot is empty or a cell has dropped below roughly 6.8V under load, the grip disables the vertical controls entirely — the top-deck shutter still fires normally. Check that both cells are seated and showing a charge level above one bar on the D7000 battery indicator before troubleshooting the grip itself.