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Reinserting Batteries Brings Life to Remote - Why?
Posted by
bostonman
on 26 May, 2022 02:31
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Has anyone experienced a phenomena where your TV remote doesn't work, you remove the batteries (or maybe spin them), reinsert them, and the remote works fine?
I've seen this with other remotes, but I have a fairly new TV (about six-months old) and I'm having a similar issue. The set of batteries that came with the remote seemed to die quickly which I thought was odd. I had old batteries from another remote and those died within a few weeks.
Now I've installed new batteries and the remote wasn't working. I removed them, measured about 1.4V, reinserted them, and the remote worked fine. Now it periodically requires me to perform the same steps of reinserting them.
I'm curious if anyone knows why this happens (it also happens with my car remote - I need to just spin the CR battery without removing it).
Although I never owned a Nintendo, my understanding is people would remove the game cartridge, blow on the gold fingers, reinsert it, and it would work. Maybe it's the same magic as the batteries.
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#1 Reply
Posted by
xrunner
on 26 May, 2022 02:45
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Yep I have - it's just a bad battery connection. I have the same issue with a beard trimmer too. The battery contacts they use are El Cheepo and don't make good electrical contact.
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#2 Reply
Posted by
TimFox
on 26 May, 2022 02:46
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I've had similar resuscitations when merely rotating cylindrical batteries in their holders to improve the contact.
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modern remotes don't use hardware IR transmitters anymore. They are all micro's running firmware. firmware with bugs.
i have a Fire TV. it uses a bluetooth remote. that thing eats batteries ! .they barely last one month. my vizio tv is 7 years old and still using its original batteries from some weird brand. (maxwon or something).
but this new remote has a microphone for alexa and other crap i never use.
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#4 Reply
Posted by
bostonman
on 26 May, 2022 03:07
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modern remotes don't use hardware IR transmitters anymore. They are all micro's running firmware. firmware with bugs.
i have a Fire TV. it uses a bluetooth remote. that thing eats batteries ! .they barely last one month
This explains a great deal.
The ones that came with the remote (as usual) are some no name. When they died, I thought it was odd because usually batteries last years, but thought they were just really cheap. The second set I used were old ones that died quickly and attributed them to being low and sitting around.
The recent ones were brand new and were measuring 1.4V after less than a month. I didn't measure the current draw, but measured the resistance in case something was low resistance to ground. So far the remote has been working, but, as mentioned, need to move or reinsert the batteries.
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modern remotes don't use hardware IR transmitters anymore. They are all micro's running firmware. firmware with bugs.
i have a Fire TV. it uses a bluetooth remote. that thing eats batteries ! .they barely last one month
This explains a great deal.
The ones that came with the remote (as usual) are some no name. When they died, I thought it was odd because usually batteries last years, but thought they were just really cheap. The second set I used were old ones that died quickly and attributed them to being low and sitting around.
The recent ones were brand new and were measuring 1.4V after less than a month. I didn't measure the current draw, but measured the resistance in case something was low resistance to ground. So far the remote has been working, but, as mentioned, need to move or reinsert the batteries.
the old ITT SAA1250 remote transmitter consumed 10microamps. That means that, running from 4 AA batteries it had 150.000 hours of runtime ( assuming 1500mAh batteries). that's 17 years ! on a set of batteries. the IR bursts are very short. so with average use you;d still get 10 years out of a set of batteries. Most good alkaline AA are 2500maH or more.. you do the math.
The same goes for phones. My old Nokia 3310 could be in standby for over two weeks. My latest greatest fruitphone barely goes a day. What they hell are they doing ? The screen is off, only the GSM radio needs to run ( just like the nokia. The radio runs in receive, listening for incoming call or SMS.). if my phone is idle. and it can be done on moderns smartphones. the Nokia 2 (HMD design) has 56 day standby time !
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Wiping the contacts with some Deoxit can work wonders.
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#7 Reply
Posted by
Northy
on 26 May, 2022 21:14
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Could it be fretting corrosion?
I know a product that would give false low battery alarms and it was traced to this.
G
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#8 Reply
Posted by
mclute0
on 26 May, 2022 21:22
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no need to remove batteries, just wack the remote on the couch arm a few times since some type of spring device is always at one end.
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#9 Reply
Posted by
bostonman
on 27 May, 2022 01:10
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Wiping the contacts with some Deoxit can work wonders.
What's the difference between this and electronic cleaner?
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What's the difference between this and electronic cleaner?
About £10 a tin
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#11 Reply
Posted by
BrokenYugo
on 27 May, 2022 01:36
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At such low voltage any reduction in contact resistance helps. Touching the batteries will also warm them to some extent.
Many TVs still ship with IR remotes, I think the RF remotes are mostly for the streaming sticks and higher end TVs. At least a couple years back even the lower end Roku was IR
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#12 Reply
Posted by
strawberry
on 27 May, 2022 07:23
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the old ITT SAA1250 remote transmitter consumed 10microamps. That means that, running from 4 AA batteries it had 150.000 hours of runtime ( assuming 1500mAh batteries). that's 17 years ! on a set of batteries. the IR bursts are very short. so with average use you;d still get 10 years out of a set of batteries. Most good alkaline AA are 2500maH or more.. you do the math.
+ self discharge
fingery acids/fats and sweat come handy when they come in contact with metals
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#13 Reply
Posted by
Gyro
on 27 May, 2022 12:17
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What's the difference between this and electronic cleaner?
About £10 a tin
I find that a thin smear of Vaselline on the contacts works very well, and is typically free. It also provides a small amount of contact plating protection for when the batteries inevitably start to leak.
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#14 Reply
Posted by
rsjsouza
on 27 May, 2022 12:26
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modern remotes don't use hardware IR transmitters anymore. They are all micro's running firmware. firmware with bugs.
i have a Fire TV. it uses a bluetooth remote. that thing eats batteries ! .they barely last one month. my vizio tv is 7 years old and still using its original batteries from some weird brand. (maxwon or something).
but this new remote has a microphone for alexa and other crap i never use.
The batteries on our Amazon Fire TV stick lasts for about a year - still a far cry from the remote control consumption, but not a taxing issue. I wonder if the Alexa is not fully disabled and is listening 24/7 for all sounds in the room - my wife disabled ours so I don't have the details (she is the TV person in our house).
Regardless, the Bluetooth is so bad on this thing that it takes quite a while for the Fire stick to react to the remote commands. I much prefer the Roku on the other room that is full IR.
To the OP: Indeed the battery contacts are usually crap. Some steel wool usually helps for me.
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#15 Reply
Posted by
madires
on 27 May, 2022 12:40
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If you have a classic IR remote control you can add a cap (10 µF or so) in parallel with the battery to get a little bit more juice out of the batteries.
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#16 Reply
Posted by
AndyC_772
on 27 May, 2022 13:02
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the Bluetooth is so bad on this thing that it takes quite a while for the Fire stick to react to the remote commands.
Which version?
I have one of the original Fire TV sticks, and it's painfully slow to do just about everything. Takes ages to boot too.
The later 4K and 4K MAX versions are incomparably better. No issues with those at all.
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#17 Reply
Posted by
bostonman
on 27 May, 2022 13:36
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Not to deviate or complain, but what is wrong with remote controls lately?
For years all the Comcast remote/cable box in the house have quirks. They randomly run slow, don't change channels, the remotes stop working, etc... I go to Comcast to complain, they take the box and/or remote, toss it in a bin, and hand me another piece of junk. They don't do any investigating, note the failure, etc...
Years ago I had an issue where if I programmed the Comcast remote to control the volume on the TV, it would stop controlling the cable box. I brought the remote back and asked for help. The guy tossed the remote in the bin without delaying and handed me a new remote. This series of events continued about five times with the same guy. I kept demanding they do something and they kept telling me each new remote they handed me was bad when I complained.
A brand new Vizio TV and I've gone through two sets of batteries in six-months. Every so often the remote stops working forcing me to reinsert the batteries (hence the topic of this thread). Plus, I have a thumbdrive in the back and every few days it locks where it won't play anything forcing me to reset power to the TV.
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#18 Reply
Posted by
TomS_
on 28 May, 2022 05:14
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the Bluetooth is so bad on this thing that it takes quite a while for the Fire stick to react to the remote commands.
Which version?
I have one of the original Fire TV sticks, and it's painfully slow to do just about everything. Takes ages to boot too.
The later 4K and 4K MAX versions are incomparably better. No issues with those at all.
Yeah I just recently had to ditch my original Fire Stick for much the same reason. It had become unbearably slow. Streaming video was fine once it got going, but getting it going was such a chore. The 4K I replaced it with is zippy and smooth as butter.
Same thing happened with my original Chromecast. I don't know what they do to make these things turn into such piles of crap, but there should be laws against it.
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#19 Reply
Posted by
rsjsouza
on 28 May, 2022 11:58
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the Bluetooth is so bad on this thing that it takes quite a while for the Fire stick to react to the remote commands.
Which version?
I have one of the original Fire TV sticks, and it's painfully slow to do just about everything. Takes ages to boot too.
The later 4K and 4K MAX versions are incomparably better. No issues with those at all.
The one we have is, according to
Wikipedia, the second generation (2016). Despite it is a bit long in the typical lifetime of internet gadgets, only recently it started to show some overall slowdown (the remote issues were always a problem, though).
I attribute the overall slowdown to system updates that eat more RAM at every instance and (maybe) more internal Flash storage - after all, the quad core 1.3GHz should be enough to handle quite the workload. For the pace of our current world of disposable gadgets, though, the fact it still works
at all is quite impressive.
Same thing happened with my original Chromecast. I don't know what they do to make these things turn into such piles of crap, but there should be laws against it.
Our original Chromecast (gift of a friend) never saw much action - it was terrible from the start. A friend of mine tried to make it work on his HDTV at the time (720p) and, after spending about a day of fruitless efforts, broke it in anger and threw it away.
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#20 Reply
Posted by
bostonman
on 28 May, 2022 16:16
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Amazing, the two batteries (AAA) are down to 0.8V and the remote isn’t working. The batteries are about a month old and brand new out of the package.
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#21 Reply
Posted by
BrokenYugo
on 28 May, 2022 16:28
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I saw something like this a while back, an IR remote that worked but killed batteries in like a week. I didn't diagnose it past washing the board and finding no improvement. I'd guess ESD damage to the chip or maybe the decoupling cap went leaky.
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#22 Reply
Posted by
james_s
on 28 May, 2022 17:08
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It's contact resistance caused by oxidation and/or contamination. The same reason some relays and switches have a minimum load, if you try to use a power relay to switch a low current signal the contacts will eventually develop high resistance. If you clean the battery terminals with some Deoxit that will usually do a good job preventing it. If you live in a high humidity region you could add a smear of dielectric grease to prevent oxidation.
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#23 Reply
Posted by
bostonman
on 28 May, 2022 17:28
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This is interesting, I actually didn’t know about the reason behind minimum loads.
This is the only remote doing it and I’m quite sure the original batteries died within a month or two because maybe four-months into owning the TV, I used the remote and discovered they were the most dead I’ve ever measured a battery to be. I don’t remember, but maybe down to 0.3V.
If it matters, it’s a Toshiba model: 43LF621U21
I may have accidentally thought it was a Vizio. It’s a TV I don’t use often, but thanks to quick draining batteries, it’s more of a hassle to try navigating TV menus when I need to because the batteries always need to be replaced first.
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#24 Reply
Posted by
AndyBeez
on 28 May, 2022 17:46
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It's a 'life hack' as old as remote controllers. Rubbing the contacts on your denim jeans is another technique. You can use someone elses jeans, but ask them first
On a cold day, warm the remote on a central heating radiator to 'recharge' the alkalines.
On the subject of remotes, our ROKU controller is a complete prima donna with battery brands. Some work fine, others just parfffff. The battery orientation is 'unique'.