- Anyone who has used the
"Approach" series Garmin golf GPS in question knows that the test is set up and fake. The message which comes up where they stop the test on Alkalines is a nag screen which you can "okay" to get past, and then the device continues working fine for another 8 plus hours after that. It basically says that the screen will reduce in brightness and to avoid that you should really use NiMH cells rather than Alkaline. The device has not "died" at that point.
- The analogy of the snail climbing the wall is not analogous at all, and has no relevance to the subject.
- Devices don't just suddenly die the moment they get a current spike that drops the battery to 1.1V. That is ridiculous, and no AA-run device works that way, regardless of their "test" of the Garmin. When a device uses spikes of current so great that it causes the cells to suddenly dip in voltage, and just as suddenly recovery, if they're "smart" devices, they have capacitance built in to smooth that out, and electronics to deal with the dips and troughs. If they're a "dumb" device, like a simple motor driven toy, then the device will keep running regardless of noise peaks and dips in the voltage.
- All of their tests are faked or skewed in some way using cherry-picked devices with very specific test conditions shown to make it appear that their device is working.
A good way to test their claims without even having a Batteriser would be to run alkalines in typical devices; remotes, mice, DMM's, toy trains, cymbal playing monkeys (?), etc; until they stop functioning at all (not just until a low battery message comes up).
Then, take the "dead" Alkaline cells and discharge them with test equipment logging the voltage and current to calculate the total power dischargeable from the cell.
That will show how much
energy really remained in the cell after that particular device said it was "dead" (Because that's what is important, the remaining energy, not the open circuit voltage, of course, as everyone on this forum already knows).
Then you can take the total energy that type of cell has from new (according to the datasheets or from testing new cells of the same type), subtract the remaining energy, divide by the amount of time the device ran until it thought the battery was dead, and you will be able to calculate how much extra running time you might get if you were able to eke every single mWh out of the cells.
From my own experience and tests (not usable as my equipment isn't lab grade), when my AA-run devices say their battery is dead, the cells have very very little usable energy left in them, regardless of what open circuit voltage the cells recover to after being removed. (Anyway, I've switched everything over to eneloops nowadays. My days of using Alkalines are long gone (except in super low energy devices like wall clocks, remote controls, and DMMs)).
As has already been stated previously, most modern devices that run on AA cells are very good at using up nearly all of the available energy in the cells.
I think part of that is because most of the AA devices (those I own and use anyway), are designed to also run well on NIMH cells, so they all work fine down to 0.8-0.9V/Cell (under load), at which point there is really very little energy remaining in any cell, Alkaline or NiMH.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
