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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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.