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."

Comments

Baffled?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?

Re:Baffled?

[Penguinisto]

To be fair, there is a difference between a realistic-yet-slightly-exaggerated claim like most companies give, and Billy Mays 'as-seen-on-TV' territory...

Re:Baffled?

[Rei]

Yes, I am. Because if people go into it expecting an 8x increase and only get a 50% increase they write terrible reviews for it everywhere and the idea spreads that it's snake oil. If they go into it expecting a 50% increase and get it, they'll be quite happy.

One shoots themselves in the foot by going too far with their claims. Often it's better to underpromise and overdeliver.

Anyway, I can think of some applications where you might get 8x, or even more. I've owned electronics which don't run on alkalines at all and require NiMH because regular alkalines suffer too much voltage drop under high peak current loads and thus you can't turn the device on at all. In such a case the battery life increase of a voltage booster could be basically "infinite", in that useful life goes from "zero" to "nonzero". I've also had electronics that work with alkalines, but just barely. In such cases you might get 8x (or 2x, or 50x... it all depends on the device).

On the other hand, if people use one of these in, say, a TV remote or flashlight, yeah, they'll be really disappointed with the 8x claim.

Re:Baffled?

[MightyYar]

He needs to sell as many of these as he can in as short a period as possible - there will be no repeat customers because it will take almost no time at all for other companies to copy this thing and undercut his price. There is not much IP here - just a slick miniaturization.

Re:Baffled?

[zacherynuk]

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)

Re:Baffled?

[funwithBSD]

I think you have a bigger problem at that point, like, say, the FIRE?!

Re:Baffled?

[Beardo the Bearded]

Just go with it. I'm an EE and if I tried to over-pedant everything wrong I encountered in a day I'd starve to death.

Re:Baffled?

[TheCarp]

Well as far as I understand from reading some battery charger spec sheets, many modern chargers actually provide a constant current rather than voltage for charging, stopping when the voltage required to maintain that current rises too high, which indicates its level of charge.

So while voltage is not charge, its entirely possible, and common, to measure the charge in the battery by relating it directly to a particular voltage, so in that context it is actually a measure of charge because it has a known relationship when used correctly.

In fact, this same measure was often used with lead acid batteries, especially car batteries, since measuring output voltage is often the most accessible way to determine whether is taking a charge or not.

Re:Baffled?

[The Grim Reefer]

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.

Re:Baffled?

[nitehawk214]

1 star review: Smoke detector stopped sounding alarm when fire finally reached it and destroyed it.

Re:Baffled?

[serviscope_minor]

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!

Re:Baffled?

[TheCastro1689]

I thought the idea was to make covered parking lots with solar panels, and that the road ones would work on places like stadiums that are only used once or twice a week.

Marketers and jouranlists exaggerating?

[penguinoid]

What is the world coming to?

Re:Marketers and jouranlists exaggerating?

[monkeyxpress]

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.

Re:Marketers and jouranlists exaggerating?

[drinkypoo]

I imagine it would be easier to sell batteries wrapped in cat stickers than a product like this.

Sir, you are a genius. All they have to do is remodel this device so that it looks like a long, slinky cat has itself wrapped around the battery. Call it the "battery cat". It'll be like printing money.

Longerer

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> It will last 8x as long!"

That'll learn ya to cut-and-paste boilerplate from an ExtenZ ad.

I still want one

[gurps_npc]

If only to see if it works.

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?

Re:I still want one

[gweilo8888]

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.

Re:I still want one

[miknix]

This is a product for morons who lack the ability to think critically: No more, no less.

You don't know anything about what you are talking about! I'm using these batterisers with my CD rewinder device right now and it allows to rewind 5 more CDs using a single battery! How great is this?

Debunking the debunker

[suso]

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.

Re:Debunking the debunker

[gweilo8888]

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.)

Re:Debunking the debunker

[Rei]

Leaks or overheating is something that would concern me. If you're compensating for reduced voltage by drawing more current then that means more ohmic heating.

How much of a problem this would be in the real world, I really don't know. I assume (or at least hope) they have limits on their product to prevent overheating.

Re:Debunking the debunker

[omnichad]

And yet any rechargeable battery puts out 1.2V (the average voltage of a 1.5V alkaline under load) and most devices allow rechargeables to be used.

Re:Debunking the debunker

[Mr D from 63]

I haven't done the measurements, but I believe once an alkaline battery gets down below 1.3V, the drop off with load becomes quite dramatic. So while it may read something like 1.2V under no load, voltage will drop like a rock as soon as current starts flowing.

Re:Debunking the debunker

[oobayly]

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.

Re:Debunking the debunker

[utahjazz]

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.

Not true. According to E=MC^2, a single AA battery contains 0.023 kg * c^2 = 2x10^15 Joules of energy. When have you ever used more than 20% of that!!?!?!

Internal resistance

[AntronArgaiv]

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.

Something smells fishy...

[mlts]

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.

EEVblog at YouTube

[jones_supa]

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.

Joule Thief

[bigattichouse]

(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.

Still useless...

[Lumpy]

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.