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."
"I'm genuinely baffled as to why Batteroo would need to resort to claims like 8 times life."
Really? You are genuinely baffled why a company might exaggerate their claims? Really?
What is the world coming to?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
> It will last 8x as long!"
That'll learn ya to cut-and-paste boilerplate from an ExtenZ ad.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I have a battery tester and when batteries stop working, I sometimes check and easily see they still have some power left, if not enough to run the device.
Even if this device extends battery life only 10% it is probably worth it.
Of course, the real question is why don't they build it into the batteries/devices in the first place?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
Considering that a standard NiCd AA cell has a voltage of 1.2V, , the notion that most devices will stop working with a voltage below 1.3V is rather obviously false.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
That's the problem you found with this?
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.
The old NiMH rechargeables start at 1.2V fully charged. If devices stop working below 1.3V, then they can't use these rechargables at all.
However, a "1.5V boost converter sleeve" on a NiMH does make an interesting case....
If you haven't yet checked it out, Dave's YouTube channel is quite interesting stuff if you are an electronics geek or want to learn more about the topic.
(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
It's pretty easy to make your own one of these, you can make it a voltage doubler too so that you can drive LEDs.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=joul...
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
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.
A good way to tell is with nickle metal hydride rechargables. They have a 1.2v cell voltage. So does a device work with them? Then it'll work on less than 1.3v. Of the things in my house that take batteries, all but one have worked with them. That device, a swifer wetjet, specifically says no rechargables so I haven't tried.
NiMH batters work well in devices including, but not limited to, remotes, wireless microphones, EOTech sights, laser pointers, cordless phones, headphone amplifiers, and wireless mice.
I've started taking complaints about bad grammar, spelling mistakes and the like as implicit agreement with the post - obviously the complainer can't find a logical error and has to resort to complaining about the delivery. I'm not a fan of spelling mistakes, but I make enough of them myself so it'd be hypocritical to call people out.
On the other hand, I tend not to even bother reading vast posts or those without punctuation - I make the assumption that the argument is likely to be as incoherent as the writing.
NiCd recharcheables are 1.2v, so clearly they're talking bollocks.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A volt is indeed equivalent to a joule per coulomb, but where do they say how many coulombs it can hold? It's still garbage.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Mine is AAA, thank you.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Well, except when the smoke detector catches fire, like in a fire.
In that case if you are still around then clearly the beeping did not wake you up so perhaps the sound of the exploding battery might. See, it's really just an extra safety measure.
Not sure why he is blaming Batteriser for the claims.
This comes straight from a blog post at phys.org.; "When we get a new battery it is 1.5 volts, when we use it in a device it goes down to 1.3 volts under load condition, at that point we consider it to be dead and throw it away," said Dr. Kiumars Parvin, professor of physics at San Jose State University.
It seems that the claim is from a physics professor, not Batteriser. Or maybe Batteriser started using making the claim based on the comments of a professor.
Moreover, the same blog post goes on to say; "Prof. Parvin said that in a lab test of the sleeve, "we confirmed that the Batteriser taps into the 80 percent of energy that is usually thrown away."
So we apparently have a professor of physics saying one thing and someone else disagreeing. I can't say which is right, but it's clear to me that the company is only stating what the professor has already stated. So if this person is debunking anything, it isn't the claims of a company but the claims of a professor.
I think it all hinges on the condition of batteries when they are discarded. Period. Not the condition they might be in if the person had attempted to extract every last bit of energy, but actual real world condition. It seems to me that I've read stuff concerning this before by researchers who have actually studied discarded batteries. But I couldn't find anything today.
Correct: 0.450V
meh
Hence the concerns.
Now, this does open up an interesting thought about creating microprocessors that can work with spikes of power, holding state... much more complex, but able to run on frighteningly small pulses of energy.
meh
Kinda like I said: Great for an LED flashlight, and that's about it. (possibly a motor driven as well - think old-time casette player or *ahem* personal "massage" device).
meh
Not mentioned in the article hare at Slashdot (but Dave talks about it at the end of his EEVBlog so stick around) is the efficiency of a boost DC-DC convertor at low currents. At best, this device has a 50% efficiency which, to quote Dave on this, is "pissing away 50% of his battery" just by having this thing attached. This alone means that the claim is outright impossible, on any normal device that just sips power from the battery, like a wall clock.
- I stole your sig.
This is their secret marketing plan. Make outrageous claims, and all the do-gooders on the Internet will HAVE to buy one to debunk the claims!
That guy doesn't actually test the device, just tries to tell us why the claims are too optimistic.
http://www.eevblog.com/2015/06...
I'd rather see real, objective testing using all sorts of typical loads and battery types.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Linear Technology had ads in ED and EDN when they released their low voltage boost converters which could start at 1.2 volts and operate down to 0.65 volts. Their advertising phrase was "how to suck a battery dry" with a picture of the battery rolled up like a toothpaste tube.