EEVblog #751 - How To Debunk A Product (The Batteriser)

[ez24]

Every battery powered tool I have purchased in the last 8 to 10 years has had Li-ion.

Not everyone is lucky as you.  My tools are not Li-ion 

[Mr.B]

Every battery powered tool I have purchased in the last 8 to 10 years has had Li-ion.

Not everyone is lucky as you.  My tools are not Li-ion 

Thats a bit sad...
Li-ion is just about all you can buy in New Zealand.
I am pretty sure you would have great difficulty purchasing a modern tool with NiCd batteries in NZ. I am quite happy to be corrected on this of course.
In the last 12 months I have purchased: Screwdriver, Drill, Small Circular Saw and Angle Grinder (padlock master key) and all of them are Li-ion.

[drussell]

I haven't seen NiCd in power tools for years.
Every battery powered tool I have purchased in the last 8 to 10 years has had Li-ion.

Most decent tools are available with a choice of batteries.  NiCd or Li-ion...

I've tried a couple of the Li-ions on my Ryobi gear and while they did provide a nice runtime and were lighter than the NiCd packs, they only lasted about 15-25 recharge cycles before the electronics detected some problem with the cells and disabled the ability to charge.  After being bitten by that a few times I said screw it, I'm going back to the NiCds.

Considering the full-size Li-ion packs run $90-110 and I can pick up a two pack of NiCDs for $49.99, it's a no-brainer.  I'm sticking with the NiCd packs.  I have about 20 of them.  (Yes, I use them a lot...  I have two single chargers, a 6-port charger, circular saws, a sawzall, drills, flashlight, even a whipper-snipper and a hedge clipper.)  Some of the ones I'm still using are over 10 years old and still hold some decent charge.  When a pack gets tired, I open them up, find the weak cells and replace them with good ones from another pack...  They tend to work for a few more years almost as good as new ones once you get rid of the worst cells since they're all in series so (the weakest link and all that....)

You can't do that with Li-ion packs.  You'd have to have a jig to tap into the microcontroller and reset it to working condidion after "fixing" a pack, that's just not practical for the average person.  Some of my the cells in some of my bodged-together packs have thousands of cycles on them and the cells just won't die.  The cells in all the ones I have are made by Panasonic.

[LabSpokane]

As much as I hate to feed the trolls.....

Wrong as usual.
Muppets are wrong a lot.
UL did the test and of course you will say the test is rigged so UL ran a rigged test.
Grow up and accept you are wrong sometimes. It is not a scam, you lose.

The UL did the tests on the Batteriser using the test jig and methodology supplied by Batteroo and reported the results.

If the test was completely invalid (which I personally believe it was) that's not the UL's fault.  They did exactly what they were asked to and supplied a (humourous) report to that effect.  There is absolutely no scientific data provided in that report, nor has there been any credible scientific evidence or any valid data at all supplied by Bateroo regarding the Batteriser.  We're still patiently waiting.

As for who's wrong or needs to grow up, I think everyone with any kind of professionalism and credibility in this industry will find that information to be glaringly self-evident...

The UL report is based on a client-provided test fixture that is designed to produce an incorrect result  either by ignorance or intent. The "two hour GPS life" result been so thoroughly disproved, and is so easily disproved with modest means, that only fools would continue to stand by such a claim at this date.

[Fsck]

Being from the Netherlands, I assumed "standard rechargable " to mean NiCd.

In India standard AA/AAA rechargeable means NiMH. NiCd's are for "cordless phones".

you won't find NiCd commonly in canada either, so rechargeable would mean NiMH here too.

Based on my interaction with my relatives that stay in the US I have to clearly differentiate NiMH from rechargeable's since they consider rechargeable = rechargeable Alkaline.

I've yet to see rechargeable Alkaline. Although they seem to exist according to Wikipedia, for sure they are not to be considered as standard type of rechargeables. Good luck to even finding a charger which officially supports them.

Being from the Netherlands, I assumed "standard rechargable " to mean NiCd.

Not for last 10 years, NiCd batteries are relic of the past. The vast majority of rechargeable AA batteries are NiMh.

What?!  Are you guys all nuts? 

- NiCd are readily available in Canada just like NiMH, though most of the super-expensive retail brands like Duracell and Energizer you will normally find NiMH being pushed by the retail stores because they can charge more for that bit of extra capacity and they are easier to build with lower self-discharge characteristics which is important for low-drain devices like a remote control.  NiCd is far superior for heavy cycle heavy loads and huge multi-cell packs of them are even used in some off-grid or battery backup inverter setups.

for me, common would be somewhere a university student without a car would go. this basically limits it to the popular malls and anything really close to public transit.

[Mr.B]

snip
The cells in all the ones I have are made by Panasonic.
snip

I agree with you totally.
I have a 22 year old Panasonic NiCd battery drill. I have replaced the battery pack once.
It does not get a lot of use however.

Mostly I was just saying that Li-ion is just about the only battery technology available in New Zealand for hand held power tools.
I have not (yet) suffered your issue of premature failure with Li-ion.
My oldest Li-ion battery drill is about 9 years and still going strong.
I am only a weekend warrior though, so it does not get a hammering.

Sorry, I am clouding this thread with chat. I will shut up now.

[edy]

It is a cumulative average designed to be completely deceptive.

For example, 60% of batteries had on average 55% capacity left. Now add on the next 10% of batteries and average that in with the top 60% group, and the average of these 70% top batteries now drops down to 47%.

Let's think about this for a minute.

If I have 100 batteries, I sort them and pick my top 60 and their average is 55% remaining capacity. Ok. I find my next 10 best batteries and include them in my average so I have 70 batteries.

Guess what? If those additional 10 batteries have ZERO capacity left, the weighted average goes from 55% to 47%.

(60 x 55 + 10 x 0)/70 = 47

If you "reverse-engineer" that table and pull out each step of the cumulative average and notice what it does to the previous step average, you can see how it actually works. I'll post a spreadsheet later.

When they say 100% of batteries have 33% of capacity left, that is an AVERAGE! Actually, a good deal of them (like the bottom 40%) have ZERO capacity... All they do is pull the cumulative average down until they get to 33%... just like I showed what happened from when I included 60 batteries and then added the next worst 10 batteries.

Look at the plot in the study after the chart and notice how things hit bottom for most of the lines after about 50-60% of batteries are included. It is more accurate to say almost half of the batteries had no capacity left, all they did was pull down an average, which is completely different than saying all 100 batteries have 33% capacity left.

[Jay_Diddy_B]

Hi McCarthy and the group,

You asked:

So why does Batteriser claim "Tap into 80%" if there is only 33% in average left?

Also keep in mind: this study is 13 years old. Today even more devices have a booster build in. Hence these days the amount left in batteries is probably less than 25%. That’s far away from 80%.



The Batteriser guys took the top  two lines which says that 30% of the batteries discarded had 84% of the energy left.

They make the claim that 100% of the energy could be extracted from these batteries using the Batteriser. Since only 16% of the energy was extracted the devices have the potential to last 84/16 x longer  5x longer.

If you take only the top line you get 93/7 time longer 13x longer.

This proposition is flawed. It assumes that the ONLY reason that the batteries were discarded is because they no longer worked in a product.

I have discarded batteries because:

1) they are old

2) I am putting some thing away for storage and I don't want them to leak

3) Some thing breaks and I try new batteries etc....


Jay_Diddy_B

[Halcyon]

Wrong as usual.
Muppets are wrong a lot.
UL did the test and of course you will say the test is rigged so UL ran a rigged test.
Grow up and accept you are wrong sometimes. It is not a scam, you lose.

We all know who is he. And judging by his level of (im)maturity and use of the English language, I'd say he's no older than 16.

[ccs46]

Wrong as usual.
Muppets are wrong a lot.
UL did the test and of course you will say the test is rigged so UL ran a rigged test.
Grow up and accept you are wrong sometimes. It is not a scam, you lose.

We all know who is he. And judging by his level of (im)maturity and use of the English language, I'd say he's no older than 16.

 

[edy]

Hi folks,

I've put together the attached EXCEL spreadsheet showing why the Zinniker tables are so confusing. They are CUMULATIVE plots. That means as you keep adding batteries you average the "capacity" in with the previous.

The EXCEL spreadsheet "reverse-engineers" the Zinniker table and shows the ACTUAL mAh contribution of each successive 10% of batteries they added. Remember the cumulative distribution plot is a sorted plot.

The calculations show that a good 40% of their batteries had ZERO REMAINING CAPACITY. That means if you go to a garbage bin, and you pick out 100 batteries at random, you will find 40 are COMPLETELY DEAD. That is what Zinniker found too, it was just presented in a way that hides it due to the "averaging" effect. You can even see it better by flipping the cumulative sort from high to low, to low to high after pulling out the raw data for each step-wise increment of batteries from the original table.

Have a look for yourself (here is a screenshot of the full Excel file, also included):

[Nerull]

I've yet to see rechargeable Alkaline. Although they seem to exist according to Wikipedia, for sure they are not to be considered as standard type of rechargeables. Good luck to even finding a charger which officially supports them.

Till a few years back the only rechargeable's  Duracell and Energizer were selling were rechargeable Alkalines in the US. "NiMH" was generally considered Japanese Technology. Anyway this discussion got me spending some more time online and discovering that NiCd actually use/used an alkaline electrolyte. Any battery chemistry experts her to verify this?

I've lived in the US my entire life, and never seen rechargeable alkalines. Rechargeable batteries were NiCd, but mostly NiMH now.

From what I'm seeing, rechargeable alkaline is proprietary tech and neither Duracell or Energizer have licensed it. Rayovac is the only major brand that has, and they don't seem to sell them in the US.

The tech was only introduced in 1992. Older products had warnings about trying to recharge standard alkalines, not using rechargeable alkalines.

It doesn't sound very good, either. Apparently rechargeable alkaline only recharge to 60% of initial capacity if fully discharged, and continue losing significant capacity every cycle.

It IS possible, though not recommended, to recharge standard alkaline batteries. Perhaps that's what people were thinking of?

On another note, Milwaukee tools does still offer NiCd packs but its interesting that the NiCd packs only have a 1 year warranty while the lithium packs in the same form factor have 3 year warranties.

[ez24]

Rayovac is the only major brand that has, and they don't seem to sell them in the US.

I bought mine in the 90s in San Diego.  As far as I know SD is in the US.  FYI they are heavy.

[Joule Thief]

Wrong as usual.
Muppets are wrong a lot.
UL did the test and of course you will say the test is rigged so UL ran a rigged test.
Grow up and accept you are wrong sometimes. It is not a scam, you lose.

We all know who is he. And judging by his level of (im)maturity and use of the English language, I'd say he's no older than 16.

Mentally, yes. No doubt.
Chronologically, who can say?

[Joule Thief]

Hi McCarthy and the group,

You asked:

So why does Batteriser claim "Tap into 80%" if there is only 33% in average left?

Also keep in mind: this study is 13 years old. Today even more devices have a booster build in. Hence these days the amount left in batteries is probably less than 25%. That’s far away from 80%.



The Batteriser guys took the top  two lines which says that 30% of the batteries discarded had 84% of the energy left.

They make the claim that 100% of the energy could be extracted from these batteries using the Batteriser. Since only 16% of the energy was extracted the devices have the potential to last 84/16 x longer  5x longer.

If you take only the top line you get 93/7 time longer 13x longer.

This proposition is flawed. It assumes that the ONLY reason that the batteries were discarded is because they no longer worked in a product.

I have discarded batteries because:

1) they are old

2) I am putting some thing away for storage and I don't want them to leak

3) Some thing breaks and I try new batteries etc....


Jay_Diddy_B

Back in my days as a field rep, if I had to fly cross country at odd hours and knew beforehand I would be isolated in hospital operating suites repairing instrumentation, I would always check my meters before leaving home. I would replace the batteries in my Fluke 87's and YSI temp meters as a precaution, just to avoid ANY issues when I arrived on site. I KNOW I threw away many fully functional batteries in these meters and also (in the day) in my pager.  Yea, pager, I'm that old!

[Mr.B]

^ Did you pick your forum name based on prior guilt from throwing away all those mostly full batteries... 

[Joule Thief]

^ Did you pick your forum name based on prior guilt from throwing away all those mostly full batteries... 

Very nice!  I see what you did there.

When clients were being billed over $300 and hour, stopping your troubleshooting and loosing your train of thought to diagnose the dead meter as a (fingers crossed) dead battery, then leave the operating suite, un-glove, find replacement batteries and re-glove and get your head back into the game where it was 5 minutes ago, that's nearly $30 for a battery change!

So add sheer convenience, economy and safety factors to Jay_Diddy's list.

[Don Hills]

It's the same in film and TV production... change the batteries in the radio mics etc whether they need it or not.

And change the betteries in your smoke alarms every 6 months instead of waiting till they start beeping. If you leave it till they start beeping, you take the battery out to stop the noise, then never quite get around to going out and buying a new one...

[PeterL]

 
Please guys did anyone actually read the articles provided by Batteriser?

The 'full' UL report is totally logical. It's states very very clear  that it did a measurement that is for 100% provided by batteriser, and whatever the results were, it had nothing to do with what UL normally stands for. This UL-report is just a disclaimer made by UL, with a warning that Batteroo is not allowed to associate the UL logo with their products.

The Zinniker report is also logical. They found that non-empty are thrown away. They also give a couple of reasons about why. Non of these reasons are about devices that discard batteries to early. The camera example may look that way, but what really happens here is that the camera has to stop, because due to the ESR the batteries cannot deliver enough power even though there is still some energy left in them.
The solution that Zinniker provides is to measure energy level in your battery before you throw them away. -> (And it is actually Duracell who has an implementation of this solution with their yellow battery level indicator.)

So: batteriser state some claims, and then back these claims with documents that state something totally different.
How can they do that? Simple: most people don't read the documents anyway, and most that try don't understand it. Just like EULA's. There is also reversed psychology involved here: "It's provided by Batteriser, so it must be in favour of them."
-> This is probably what Franky meant with 'Thinking out of the box'.


But we understand these documents don't we? So let's not be confused by the fact that Batteroo promotes these documents as being in favour of them.

[adprom]

The 'full' UL report is totally logical. It's states very very clear  that it did a measurement that is for 100% provided by batteriser, and whatever the results were, it had nothing to do with what UL normally stands for. This UL-report is just a disclaimer made by UL, with a warning that Batteroo is not allowed to associate the UL logo with their products.

The report also says

"UL LLC authorizes the above named company
to reproduce this Report provided it is reproduced in its entirety. The name, Brand or Marks of
UL LLC cannot be used in any packaging, advertising, promotion or marketing relating to the
data in this Report, without UL's prior written permission."

By my reading, they are in breach of this by posting the single page by itself and using the UL name for promotional advertising on their main page.

[f4eru]

Please guys did anyone actually read the articles provided by Batteriser?

Yep. We read it very carefully. And this is NOT a valid test report.

A very short and incomplete list of things lacking in this "test report" :

- Description of battery used ? "Duracell Alkaline" is not enough to describe it. Duracell makes several different types of AA alkaline batteries.

- Description of battery used ? Battery types, provenance, state, date printed, type number are all lacking. Nothing.

- Description of the Boost converters used : provenance, state, version, etc, etc... Nothing.

- Description of the GPS unit ? serial number, type number, provenance, etc... Nothing.

- description of the test setup. How was the "tapping" done. By whom ? when, how often? Nothing is described.

- Date of the test, ambient temperature, operator name, location, GPS reception and functionnal state ? Nothing is described. All these have a measurable influence on the test result !!

- "Record the time it took for one of the two messages to display" How is the time recorded ? what instrument is used ? what is the role of the operator ? Is he allowed to go to the toilet during the test and can he miss something? Again, absolutely nothing is described.

- "Batteriser installed" How ? Photo of the installed devices is necessary.

- "Garmin GPS shutting down." Deliberately Wrong.

- "one of the two messages to display" Which two messages ??

- Date of the test, date of the report ?

- Test operator, and manager sign off ? there is not a single name to be found in this document.
......


This document is not a test report. it's either a fake, or a joke.

[PeterL]

By my reading, they are in breach of this by posting the single page by itself and using the UL name for promotional advertising on their main page.

Agreed they are breaking the law, and bringing their own evidence. But they probably know exactly how far they can stretch this. And until UL summons them explicitly to remove the UL logo from their website within x days they'll just leave it there. Well that's my guess.

Please guys did anyone actually read the articles provided by Batteriser?

Yep. We read it very carefully. And this is NOT a valid test report.

A very short and incomplete list of things lacking in this "test report" :

It's not a test report at all. Batteroo wants you to believe that, and it seems to kinda work.
But this document is just a letter. It does not claim to be at test report(other than in the filename).

[nixxon]

I'd like to read the mentioned study from the "International Battery Recycling Conference". Please provide me with a link or a copy.

Here is a link to the 2003 Zinniker article with the figures quoted 42 minutes into the Batteroo's "Batteriser - Full length Batteriser explanation video". Zinniker is a bit more specific than Batteroo regarding the applied testing conditions: http://www2.ife.ee.ethz.ch/~rolfz/batak/ICBR2003_Zinniker.pdf

I havent read all the pages of the Zinniker article, I must confess.

BTW: a "LR6" battery = an alkaline "AA" battery

In the Zinniker report, it is mentioned (as Batteroo emphasize) that some devices shut off when a low voltage threshold is reached. Some alkaline batteries have a relatively large rest capacity when the test device turns off. The test device is a 2001 model Olympus C-3040. Zinniker measured a 1.4A current peak when the camera saved the image.

The manual for this camera states on page 13 that

"• Alkaline battery performance is limited, especially at low temperatures.
And it may runs out extremely shorter period than CR-V3 or NiMH.
Using NiMH batteries is recommended."
http://www.olympusamerica.com/files/oima_cckb/c3040_instm.pdf

It seems that this legacy camera is not well suited for use with alkaline batteries.

In the report, it is also assumed that some batteries (that are not rejected by the battery powered devices) are thrown away due to the following reasons:

Be sure to have good batteries
Before a weekend-trip or other activities, people want to be sure, to
have good batteries in their equipment. So they put in new ones and
dispose the "old" ones.

Mix up old and new batteries
While changeing batteries, the new set is ready for insertion, the old one
retracted and the phone is ringing. After some nice conversation, the
batteries have rolled around on the table. Now which are the new,
which are the old ones? Dispose all and take an other new set.

The rest capacity of batteries that are disposed due to "Be sure to have good batteries" or "Mix up old and new batteries" should be considered differently than the rest capacity that is discarded due to device shutoff.

[gore]

Wrong as usual.
Muppets are wrong a lot.
UL did the test and of course you will say the test is rigged so UL ran a rigged test.
Grow up and accept you are wrong sometimes. It is not a scam, you lose.

Faked or not, it is a misleading test. Let's look at the criteria the Batteriser set for this test:

"Test is terminated when one of the following occurs: 1) either GPS unit shuts down completely or 2) until the GPS unit displays a Low Battery Power message."

1) This part is not going to terminate the test. The device doesn't shut down after two hours of use, no matter how much you tap the screen.
2) This is the criteria that supposedly terminated the test. But let's take a closer look at the so called "low battery power message". Let's read it right off the Garmin's screen - "The battery power is too low for full backlight. Use rechargeable NiMH or lithium batteries to prevent this limitation". 

So it's just a limitation warning to save battery life, not a declaration of a shut down. The test is designed to make it sound like the device is not functional anymore only after ~ 2 hours of use, which absolutely misleading. In reality the device is functional for more than 10 hours, even more than that, without the backlight blasting at full power. Even if you prevent Garmin from dimming the screen, it would go for much longer than 1h52m. All in all, the Batteriser asked UL to verify the test using misleading criteria, which they supposedly did. What good is that? It seems to demonstrate dishonesty instead of battery life extension, which is what the Batteriser sleeve is suppose to excel at.

The things I've noted above were discussed and tested numerous times in this thread alone. Ultimately the reference to the UL report being thrown around is completely useless. There's no data in it. It doesn't matter who verifies what without any data attached. Either the data shows something is real, or it's nothing more than an argument from authority.

[AmmoJammo]

You can probably actually make the gps run longer by dropping the input voltage, so it's always in the reduced back light mode, rather than boosting it...