Why do you think this a scam? The voltage boost technology has been around for a while. The battery manufacturers are well aware of the wasted energy in their product and how to recover some of it.
The miniaturization of the circuit in this gizmo is the clincher.
The 800% battery life increase may even be true in some extreme case. We know marketing will naturally concentrate on those figures to grab the headlines. With most devices cutting out below 1V, the normal battery life extension is more likely to be around 20%, according to the Duracell constant power discharge curve.
This is an electronic blog. Someone here should have the equipment and the skills to disprove the claims with some hard testing of batteries, instead of everybody dismissing it all, out of hand.
Not necessarily.
It's possible that in normal operation you consume more than 11? but waste a portion of it on heat because the battery starts with higher voltage then the minimum required by your device. Theoretically, an ideal DC/DC can fix that as well.
It's not clear if the debunking here is about 'breaking the laws of physics' or is just about the limitations of our current DC/DC technology.
I think they're sunk anyway. Once (if) the product gets into production, then no amount of marketing can compensate for reality and pissed-off users. It's easy enough to knock up a battery curve generator that automatically runs a variety of load scenarios - microcontroller, handful of relays - and then the truth will be out there.
About the price: What kind of production numbers do you think they're targeting at? It must be huge I would say, and they already mentioned the price, so they really need a big start on their IGG campaign don't they?
The 800% battery life increase may even be true in some extreme case.As mentioned before, an increase by 800% would mean that only about 11% of the capacity would be used under normal conditions. Not taking into account efficiency etc. I guess it will be extremely difficult to find one case where this is the case.
We all agree that some additional energy can be squeezed out of batteries with a boost converter. Would such a converter achieve any significant gain for the user ? Simple technical considerations show that no, unless we talk about some very rare badly designed products. Therefore their claims are false and the end-users will never get what is advertised to them. This is the definition of a scam.
Wytnucls just says enough to get everyone going into explaining the thing again and again and then he replies totally ignoring everything that has been said to keep the controversy going. Totally classic troll, don't waste your time.
Typical ad hominem statement. Come up with real physics instead. All my posts are backed up by Duracell graphs and application notes. You obviously didn't bother to read or grasp any of it.
Ok, let's call it BS marketing. But who are they trying to fool here ? The first disappointed customers will tell it everywhere and nobody will buy the thing ever again. Since their strategy cannot lead to a happy growing customer base, I wonder if the real goal is not about impressing investors in order to get a big founding round...
Ok, let's call it BS marketing. But who are they trying to fool here ? The first disappointed customers will tell it everywhere and nobody will buy the thing ever again. Since their strategy cannot lead to a happy growing customer base, I wonder if the real goal is not about impressing investors in order to get a big founding round...
We all agree that some additional energy can be squeezed out of batteries with a boost converter. Would such a converter achieve any significant gain for the user ? Simple technical considerations show that no, unless we talk about some very rare badly designed products. Therefore their claims are false and the end-users will never get what is advertised to them. This is the definition of a scam.
It is not a scam. It just the usual BS marketing numbers making the headlines, seen it countless times before in every industry, nothing new here.
Companies are free to use words like "up to" etc, and have no real requirement to tell you what average figures you might expect in practice. Welcome to the free market. Of course, if they can't show at least one case of x8 improvement, then they might have some explaining to do.
You argue that the higher voltage at the begin of a battery's lifetime could be wasted due to higher currents. Well, this might be true in selected cases.
Then again the nominal voltage of a fresh alkaline cell is 1.5 V and this is exactly the voltage that this batteriser is said to deliver over the whole lifetime.
So in cases where the higher voltage means higher losses, this device extends the issue over the whole lifetime.
I don't know what exactly this product does...
... but maintaining a let's say 1.2V level throughout the life of the battery may save energy also during the high voltage period.
'Consumed' is different that 'needed'. Ideally the device should spread the charge to provide the 'needed' power for as long as possible. I don't think the video touched on that aspect.
I have a better idea
Beat you to it
I dunno, I think they'll try to productise it through crowd-funding
Yes, the article says they will be putting it on Indiegogo.
Not sure why they don't use Kickstarter? they obviously have a real prototype, so satisfies the requirement.
Why would it? It's a simple boost converter with a fixed 1.5V output.
That's a guess based on sketchy marketing material.