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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."
I don't work for the company, but to give some support of the claim that some electronics stop working at 1.3V. I've removed a lot of "dead" batteries from kids electronic toys and when testing them with a volt meter found that many of them were still putting out between 1V and 1.4V. I save anything that is over 1V because I sometimes use them with hobby electronics projects. Sometimes its only one battery in a set that has died as well, but of course that can just be fixed by finding the dead battery and only replacing that one.
My question about the batteriser is if its reusable or not. Also, I could see this thing causing quite a few more battery leaks than usual.
IIRC, didn''t they have some article about someone breaking into their company and stealing product samples? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
However, lets be real here. This voltage booster is just a mini autoformer, using a coil, a transistor, and a capacitor. This technology isn't new. MPPT controllers for solar units use this.
What is new is the form factor. However, to boost volts, there has to be a trade... and what is trades is amperage, so that a battery with a voltage drop now has to put out more current, which only accelerates the discharge process.
Of course, there is the downside... high amps being demanded, without some form of fusing or limiter can result in leakage, or even worse, fire, as a potential failure mode.
I vote no on this. Instead, my recommendation is just to spend the 30 bones and get an Apple Battery Charger or something similar, and some rechargeable batteries. This is a far safer option, and no part of the system is being driven past its engineered tolerances.
To be honest to the marketers this is a dog of a product. It is extremely hard to sell people a product that gives them some kind of mild intermittent benefit that is not immediate and in their face all the time. The other problem is that the product self-selects penny pincher type 'economy' customers, and these are just horrible horrible people to attempt to sell anything too.
I imagine it would be easier to sell batteries wrapped in cat stickers than a product like this.
(oops accidentally posted A/C)
I've coincidentally been running a battery experiment using a joule thief on a 1.5v Energizer battery (starting voltage 1.621v)
The LED and resistor I use would normally draw about 20mA from a battery, but run at 3v, requiring 2 AA batteries, and running for around 5 or 6 days in total.
Through the joule thief (similar, I am guessing the to guts of the device), I know that I can run the same LED down to 0.450mV (with a much larger current draw)... but since it basically consists of spikes of power (which can reach 5-12v) with a very short duty cycle, I can run off a single AA battery for some time.
As I use the thief in my own battery experiments (think edison cells), I decided to run an AA down and chart the voltages. I'm currently on day 10, and have made it down to 1.257v I think it will drop off quite quickly around 1.0 or 0.9v, but you can see I've easily doubled the servicable life span. At this point it has only dropped ~20mV per day, so I could possibly get 10 more servicable days out of this battery for the purposes of running an LED... so we're up to around 5X the service life.
I did not major engineering to make my thief, and it isn't particularly well made.. so I think 8X life for an LED is very possible with the data I have.
EXCEPT... I'm just making light, for a human, who can't see that it's not actually "ON" all the time. This is a very simple circuit and can easily handle the duty cycle. I have some concerns about running a microprocessor or similar toy with the device without damage.
ADDITIONALLY.. batteries can swell when they get very low voltage, and all sorts of nastiness can occur. I'd be cautious to drain one to the minimum voltage for my thief... or at least keep it on a glass plate in case of leakage.
meh
Most modern electronics already do what this does. For example Xbox 360 and Xbox One controllers will suck nearly every last drop of power out of the batteries.
If your device shuts off when they claim, it's either from the 80's or is poorly designed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I can sympathize, Granted, I live in a house, so I've always just unplugged the smoke detector with the low battery. But for some reason, they always seem to do this in the middle of the night. It's annoying as hell trying to get back to sleep after you find the one that's chirping and then unplug it, remove the battery and put it someplace you won't hear it until it finally stops chirping.
Get some 10 year "smoke detector batteries" My smoke detectors are hard wired, and the batteries are only there in case of a power failure. Since smoke detectors should also be replaced every ten years, I use a permanent marker to date the battery cover and replace all detectors and batteries at the same time.