Alkaline batteries are something that many of us have come to accept as a necessary evil. Either you pay up the premium price for the good batteries, and hope that their claims are as good as they say they are, or you risk it with a giant pack of cheap ones hoping that you don’t have to replace them every other week. They’re less of an issue now that decent rechargeables come as standard for many devices but I can count at least 4 devices in my living room still powered by these disposable power packs. I’ve heard all sorts of strange ways to extend the life of these things, from tapping them on something or warming them up in your hands, but none really provide a good solution. Batteriser purports to be able to squeeze up to 800% more life out of your alkaline cells, all by slipping on this thin metal sleeve.
All alkaline batteries start out their life providing a healthy 1.5v to the device they’re powering. As batteries become depleted however their output voltage begins to drop, slowly tapering down before dropping off a cliff depending on battery formulation. This is how all modern battery meters, including the one in your phone, work: by comparing the current output of the battery against its ideal voltage and then giving you an estimated amount of percentage left. Batteriser’s claim to fame is that, regardless of the current output of the battery, it will boost up the voltage to 1.5v making it appear “new” until all the chemical energy runs out. On the surface that might sound like some form of wizardry but it’s a well known circuit referred to as a Joule Thief.
Essentially the Batteriser device is a DC to DC converter, one that takes a wide range of input voltages and boosts them up to 1.5v. They’re coy on exactly how far down their converter can go but considering that most batteries become completely unusable past the 0.6v range my guess is that they don’t work past that. Their claim is that most devices will consider a battery dead below the 1.4v range which, if you take the rather gross assumption battery capacity decreases linearly as a function of voltage (which the graphs I liked to earlier clearly show is false), then they can provide almost 800% more life out of a single AA battery.
That claim, as you can probably guess, is well out of touch with reality.
This isn’t exactly a new and unknown phenomenon, it’s an inherent property of any kind of chemical battery that you’ll find on the market today. Developers of products that use alkaline batteries know this and will often include circuitry of this nature within them in order to make their devices last longer. Indeed it doesn’t take long to find numerous home made versions of such a device, albeit with far less slick packaging than what Batteriser is showing. So, if the claims in the patent match the final production device, it might be able to squeeze some more juice out of your batteries but I wouldn’t be surprised if the additional life you got wasn’t as great as they claim it is, especially for any modern portable device.
The real innovation here is the miniaturization of the whole package which, admittedly, is quite neat in its own right. However the claims they’re making are wildly out of alignment with reality, something which isn’t going to help their case when the eventual Indiegogo campaign hits. Still I’d be interested to see just how well it functions in the real world as even a simple doubling of battery life would likely be worth the asking price (currently $10 for 4 of them, reusable). At the very least it’s on the plausible side of these kinds of crowdfunded projects rather than being outright snake oil like we’ve seen so many times before.
