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.

Comments

Don't see this taking off

[viperidaenz]

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.

1.5V alkaline vs 1.2v NiMH

[lindseyp]

"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.

Re:If it sounds too good to be true

[AmiMoJo]

This will be totally unsuitable for remote controls and will dramatically reduce the life of batteries used in them. Remote controls spend most of their time idle, drawing only a microampere or two from the batteries. Unless you intend to physically switch these cells on/off every time you want to use the remote...

Quality remotes have their own boost circuits to do this kind of thing, controlled by a microcontroller that turns them on when you press a button. Most are designed to work down to at least 1V, if not 0.9V. The 1.4V figure from TFA is nonsense; NiMH cells start at 1.2V when fully charged.

This is the wrong solution. The boost circuit needs to be part of the device, not part of the battery.