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Company Extends Alkaline Battery Life With Voltage Booster
New submitter ttsai writes: Batteroo is a Silicon Valley company preparing to release its Batteriser product in September. The Batteriser is a small sleeve that fits around alkaline batteries to boost the voltage to 1.5V. This means that batteries that would otherwise be thrown into the trash when the voltage dips to 1.3V or 1.4V could be used until the unboosted voltage reaches 0.6V, extending the useful life of a battery 8x, according to the company. This product has the potential to reduce the number of batteries in landfills as well as increasing the time between replacing batteries. The expected price of the sleeve is $10 for a pack of 4 sleeves.
It probably is.
It's going to be limited to low power device, which generally don't cut out when the battery drops to 1.4V. A lot of products are designed to get the most out of a battery, which is around 0.8V per cell.
High power devices cut out quicker because the internal resistance increases, and when a large amount of current is drawn the voltage drops significantly.
These little devices don't have much power capability if they're to be so small as to fit in existing products along side the batteries. They're also not going to be 100% efficient, so in a well designed product, they will decrease battery life.
It's just joule thief, thing is not all batteries can tolerate being over discharged and may fail catastrophically.
Since this requires an external sleeve to be mounted on the battery... I expect this will more than likely cause the battery to not fit properly in many types of devices' housing. Some people may try and force the battery to fit, and might end up breaking their devices, often without even necessarily using very much force (since the only force batteries generally require to insert in most consumer devices is against the spring tension of any battery contacts).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When a device power circuit already integrate a voltage regulator, this is yet another battery scam.
If not, it is either a cheap or old piece of electronic.
This battery extender _is_ yet another battery scam.
Next expand your car mileage by adding a water sprayer, magic canister?
This is not news for nerds.
_This_ is scamvertisement.
Léa Gris
"A completely new alkaline battery is rated to generate 1.5 volts, but once its output drops below 1.35 or even 1.4 volts, it effectively becomes useless to many devices. "
And yet I can't recall any device that didn't work happily with the 1.2v supplied by a rechargeable NiMH.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Ok, DC-DC converters do have a legitimate place in battery powered systems. You want a blue or white LED in your flashlight without resorting to an expensive cell chemistry or 3ish alkalines in series? Well, DC-DC converter it is. You(for some reason) have an antique filament-bulb flashlight and you don't want it to spend the last chunk of its life putting out relatively useless IR because the filament temperature is too low for visible light? A DC-DC converter will fully flatten the batteries faster(because of its own losses, and because current draw has to increase as voltage droops in order to maintain the same power output); but at least the entire lifespan will be spent putting out usable light.
However, there's a problem here: Most even vaguely well designed widgets already tolerate some amount of voltage variation. Especially because NiCd and NiMH rechargeables are only good for ~1.2v(maybe 1.3-1.4 hot off the charger, for a few moments), alkalines for ~1.5; but with well known droop as they are exhausted or if discharge current is too high; and lithium primary cells in AAA or AA packages are up around 1.7, with less droop; you simply can't build a consumer widget that is too picky about battery voltage. If you do, you'll be flooded with unhappy and confused customers and probably lots of expensive returns.
This seems to constrain the useful market for this product to a very narrow, rather weird, niche: Anything that already tolerates voltage droop well will see very limited benefit. Anything with very low power draw will also see very limited benefit, because even badly depleted batteries slump as discharge current increases. Devices with very high power draw might see a benefit; because they will drive the battery to slump most quickly(and, according to the discharge curves for most alkalines, very high currents will cause substantial slump well before the capacity is exhausted); but the DC-DC converter will need even higher discharge current in order to keep power output constant as voltage drops, which will exacerbate the voltage slump, and likely hit the wall where the effective internal resistance of the battery is high enough that it simply won't deliver any more current.
So what actually gains? Devices that are maldesigned enough to brown out with even modest voltage droop; but also sufficiently low drain that the draw of the converter will remain within the battery's 'best-case' discharge cycle; but not so low drain that the (modest; but nonzero) losses in the DC-DC converter increase the overall drain by a substantial amount.
Anyone have a device or devices in mind?
So why is this not built in the devices that need it?
My thought exactly. This is why one should be extremely skeptical. The article says that none of the circuitry is new, it's only the miniaturization to a sleeve a few millimeters thick that is the trick. So why wouldn't toy manufacturers build this type of thing into their toys to make them last longer? Wouldn't this make people like the toys more? Or at least have fewer gripes? And doesn't every battery powered device need to last longer?
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