Slashdot Mirror
Debunking the Batteriser's Claims
An anonymous reader writes: Last week we discussed news about the "Batteriser," a small device that fits around a battery and extends its lifetime. Many of us were skeptical, particularly with the claim that it could extend battery life up to 8x. Now, David L. Jones at the EEVBlog explains exactly why the device won't be as good as its creators claim. The technology itself, he says, does actually work at extending battery life, and has existed for a long time. What this company seems to have done is just shrink it down to a more useful size. Unfortunately, their claims about when a battery stop working and how much energy is left don't really hold up. Batteroo, the company making the Batteriser, claims products stop working when a battery's voltage drops below 1.3v, but a simple test of common household gadgets finds that to be untrue. Further, the percentage of energy left in the battery after this cutoff can vary wildly. Sometimes it will be 80%, but most of the time it won't, and it's frequently 20% or lower for Alkaline batteries. Jones writes, "I'm genuinely baffled as to why Batteroo would need to resort to claims like 8 times life. This thing would still sell like hot cakes if they claimed realistic practical figures. 50% increase in your battery life? – great, countless people would still buy it at the super low price point it's at."
When you measure terminal voltage, it's going to vary, depending on the load you put on while you measure, and the battery's internal resistance. So 1.3V with no load is different than 1.3V with a 100mA (for example) load. Put another way, 1.3V without a load may translate to much less when the battery is put into the system. At the end of the day, when the battery starts to die, you don't have much energy left. You can maybe prolong it for a bit with one of these gadgets, but it's like sucking the last slurps of a smoothie...pretty soon, you're going to be out of juice.
I've routinely tested my batteries for years, and only a handful of kids toys died at 1.3 to 1.35V, but they were in the extreme minority. And the summary is wrong, anyway -- Batterizer didn't claim 1.3 volts, they claimed 1.35 to 1.4 volts, which is utter nonsense. I've never seen a single product I own that died at 1.4 volts. (And the Batterizer PR folks didn't say "some" products, they said "most" or even all, which is a bald-faced lie.)
If it extends the battery life by only 10%, it is almost certainly *not* worth it. Priced at $2.50, it's appearance suggests a relatively flimsy product that's unlikely to last very long before you break it. Looking at the most popular AA batteries on Amazon, price per cell is just 24 cents.
That means a 10% increase in battery life is saving you 2.4 cents per cell, so you'd have to run 104+ cells through each Batterizer you need to buy before you first break even. (And most products, in my experience, use at least two cells, suggesting that you'll need multiple Batterizers and will have to run multiple hundreds of cells through them before you break even.)
Add in the fact that despite Batterizer's claims, the deeper you drain a battery, by far the more likely it is to leak, coupled with the fact that the kinds of things that are likely to leave any significant power in the cells in my experience tend to be those which drain power very slowly, and the chances of you saving any money with Batterizer are zip. This is a product for morons who lack the ability to think critically: No more, no less.
Try using Lithium batteries (Not Lithium Ion) - these are superb in smoke detectors. (The irony being they have a small explosion risk in some usage case, though smoke detectors aren't one of them)
Even worse, if you watch their promo video - Dave mentions this at the end of his vblog - it goes actually says:
Did you know that every dead battery you've every thrown away had only used up to 20% of battery life.
That's an out and out lie.
But for some reason, they always seem to do this in the middle of the night.
The reason is that the house is colder at night. The lower temperature slows down the reactions in the battery and the voltage drops slightly. When it warms up, the reactions speed up and voltage increases again. So it's not you imagining it, there's actually a reason for the annoyance!
SJW n. One who posts facts.