While looking for uses for old disposable AA batteries, I ran across the Batteriser from 2015. Clearly, it was a flop of some sort, as I am posting in 2024. What happened? Are there any iterations that do work?
https://money.cnn.com/2015/06/02/technology/make-battery-last-longer-batteriser/index.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batteroo_Boost
Also, are there any uses for old batteries?
Rechargeable AA batteries have become much more accessible… And imo far fewer devices that we use take replaceable batteries. It’s much more common for devices to just have built in rechargeable batteries.
Rechargeable AA batteries have become much more accessible
honest question: when was this not the case? I used rechargable batteries in my gameboy in the early 90s.
Batteries as well as rechargers are dirt cheap for well over 2 decades
Because rechargable batteries before NiMH sucked for many use cases - they were good for the Gameboy as you charged and used them straight away at high draw, but try using one in a low power device like a remote or wall clock and you’ll find it is dead in a week despite minimal actual usage
It flopped because it doesn’t really work, and most stuff we stick batteries on these days already do a good job of extracting all the energy out of the batteries. It’s mostly already built-in.
EEVblog made a few videos on it:
- https://youtu.be/Z-m-7jex88k?si=KhEtCmvGkeyEtj4h
- https://youtu.be/Tl90m2KHbNk?si=0LK6Op_E32w3tMSO
- https://youtu.be/dnXiLBabSTU?si=DufjcVHCvlLSGi5Q
Dead old batteries are dead, if there’s almost no energy in them they’re done. Best case you might be able to stick them in a remote or an LED candle or whatever. But it’s a physical limit: almost dead batteries just can’t supply high currents because of internal resistance.
Another way to look at it is those potato batteries: yeah, you can measure a voltage off them. Yeah, you might be able to light up an LED. But you will never be able to power something higher power, not even for a couple seconds. It’s physically not able to provide much current.