Disaster!

[Fungus]

I just went to try something with my Aneng AN8008 (which doesn't get used very often) and I found this:

[rvalente]

Alkalines are little devils when left flat...

[PartialDischarge]

Do you live near the sea?

[paul8f]

Looks nasty...!
A good clean with isopropyl alcohol will only go so far I think. You could try scrubbing the contacts with a micro-abrasive-pen such as Radionics #514-868. However, this will also remove the protective enameled finish, so you will then need to tin the freshly exposed metal with solder. Don't know how long this repair will last...

Can you buy replacement battery terminals somewhere?  Last resort you could just extend the positive and negative wires out to an external battery pack/battery holder, which you could stick to back of the meter with some double sided tape.

[Fungus]

Do you live near the sea?

About 700m away, but I doubt that makes a difference. That looks like sea salt but I'm fairly sure it isn't.

This is only the second or third time in my life I've had a battery leak. 

A good clean with isopropyl alcohol will only go so far I think.

Can you buy replacement battery terminals somewhere?

I usually use warm water and plenty of elbow grease.

I doubt there are any spare parts out there, even replacement fuses are almost impossible to find for these meters.

[NoisyBoy]

So sorry to see that, with the Durahell here in the US, it is a common occurrence.  AAA is the worst offender, AA is next, but I rarely seen it happen in C or D cells.  A lot of the corrosive crystal are alkaline in nature (Potassium Carbonate), I usually use diluted vinegar to neutralize it first, then remove all the liquid and residual with distilled water, then Isopropyl alcohol to dry it out.  It is a good idea to make sure to open it up and make sure no corrosion migrate beyond the battery box.

If you see my post about the Durahell batteries, those things leaks brand new inside unopened packaging.  I easily threw out a few dozen batteries in unopened packages as they leak.

I will only use the remaining alkaline batteries in high drain devices where I know I will use it up in a day or two and dispose it immediately.  For portable test gears, where the batteries can stay in it for months or over a year, I only use rechargeable and lithium batteries now. 

[Monkeh]

Unfortunate. Thankfully, the meter wasn't worth much more than a set of batteries to begin with.

[kcbrown]

This is one of the major reasons I use NiMH rechargeable batteries in my handheld equipment.  I've never seen one of those leak.  The AN8008 works just fine with them.

[Martin72]

Same here at work, we use NIMH accus for decades with no problems like this.
At home, I always use alkaline cells and last week, one of my devices are found dead because of leaking batteries...

[bc888]

Deoxit is your friend  They have both a cleaner and a sealer.

[Brumby]

... I usually use diluted vinegar to neutralize it first, then remove all the liquid and residual with distilled water, then Isopropyl alcohol to dry it out.  It is a good idea to make sure to open it up and make sure no corrosion migrate beyond the battery box.

That's my process - applied sensibly, of course.

[helius]

It actually makes all the difference. It is not sea salt, but a process accelerated by high humidity areas. In dry areas inside the country that does not happen

First of all, vicinity to the coast has little to do with humidity. Have you ever heard of a desert island?
Secondly, (alkaline) batteries do not leak from humidity. The causes of leaking are gas pressure, seal deterioration, and corrosion of the case starting on the inside. You can verify this yourself if you autopsy leaked cells.

Today, all alkaline cells have the potential to leak. Some have better seals, are made with more space for gas, and better surface finish of the case, but they can all leak under the right circumstances. The major change from 30 years ago is the removal of mercury, which helped to prevent gas and corrosion.

[CatalinaWOW]

It actually makes all the difference. It is not sea salt, but a process accelerated by high humidity areas. In dry areas inside the country that does not happen

First of all, vicinity to the coast has little to do with humidity. Have you ever heard of a desert island?
Secondly, (alkaline) batteries do not leak from humidity. The causes of leaking are gas pressure, seal deterioration, and corrosion of the case starting on the inside. You can verify this yourself if you autopsy leaked cells.

Today, all alkaline cells have the potential to leak. Some have better seals, are made with more space for gas, and better surface finish of the case, but they can all leak under the right circumstances. The major change from 30 years ago is the removal of mercury, which helped to prevent gas and corrosion.

It has been my experience that they will all leak if left flat long enough.  This sometimes escapes notice if the equipment fully electrically isolates the battery when off.  It takes quite a while for self discharge to flatten the battery enough to trigger the leak response.  But any equipment that has a sleeping processor or any other source of minor current drain will demonstrate this behavior relatively quickly.

I haven't noticed any strong dependence on humidity, but high temperatures do make the problem much worse.  Don't store anything with alkaline batteries in a car that sits in the sun.  A flashlight (torch) being the obvious example, but multimeters also love to die in that environment.

[Fungus]

It has been my experience that they will all leak if left flat long enough.  This sometimes escapes notice if the equipment fully electrically isolates the battery when off.  It takes quite a while for self discharge to flatten the battery enough to trigger the leak response.  But any equipment that has a sleeping processor or any other source of minor current drain will demonstrate this behavior relatively quickly.

Weird. Dave had no luck at all in getting his batteries to leak.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1296-alkaline-battery-leakage-testing-2-electric-boogaloo/

[Old Goat]

Oops! Take 'em out carefully, clean up as much of the junk as you can, then use a small stiff bristle brush and white vinegar. That should neutralize all the leakage. Then see where you are. Scraping contacts with an exacto knife or similar might be warranted. Then you may want to re-tin the contacts as mentioned above.

[Berni]

Hard to say what really makes alkaline batteries leak, can be a whole lot of factors of how the battery was used and stored combined with the luck of the draw that some batteries happened to be made better than others.

Try to clean it up the best you can, hopefully the meter still works. If not then at least it happened in a cheep chinese DMM. For this reason i run my good name brand DMMs on lithium AAs since they don't leak at all.

[HarryDoPECC]

+1 for vineger -> distilled -> isopropyl.  Remove the crud that loosens at each stage.  I have been caught in past before I did the vinegar, problems later due to slow progress of corrosion from residual alkali.  The weak acid also helps to remove that which is not water/alcohol soluble.

[helius]

I live in a dry area and have a summer house next to the beach, the amount of corrosion in metals that I see there, I don't see anywhere.

This is a well known effect of chloride ions (salt) in the atmosphere. See https://corrosion-doctors.org/AtmCorros/chlorides.htm

Where did I say that the battery was leaking? That was you assumption. There are other effects at play

It is visibly leaking its electrolyte (potassium hydroxide). Short of smelling and tasting it, I have every evidence needed for that, no assumptions 

[eKretz]

It actually makes all the difference. It is not sea salt, but a process accelerated by high humidity areas. In dry areas inside the country that does not happen

First of all, vicinity to the coast has little to do with humidity. Have you ever heard of a desert island?

Yes, and vicinity to the sun has nothing to do with heat, lol. Maybe, maybe the soil has something to do in desert islands.

I live in a dry area and have a summer house next to the beach, the amount of corrosion in metals that I see there, I don't see anywhere.
Where did I say that the battery was leaking? That was you assumption. There are other effects at play

This is sort of a silly analogy. (Sun/heat). Being near the ocean does have something to do with the humidity in the air, but unless you're comparing to the middle of a desert it can be pretty humid almost anywhere. I don't live anywhere near an ocean or even lake for that matter, but it's pretty humid here quite often. Wonder of wonders, it even rains here sometimes! The humidity falls right out of the air! 

Anyway, it is very evident from the photo to anyone who has ever had alkaline batteries leak and corrode equipment that the photo is showing exactly that.

[Terry Bites]

700m?
Move house!

[Fungus]

700m?
Move house!

Closer to the sea or further away?

[CJay]

This is one of the major reasons I use NiMH rechargeable batteries in my handheld equipment.  I've never seen one of those leak.  The AN8008 works just fine with them.

And yet I have. YMMV.

[rsjsouza]

I am sorry to hear that, Fungus. The quality of these little s****s of Alkalines is eroding every single day - no brand is safe. Interestingly enough, coincidentally yesterday I mentioned this to the other guy in the U1272A thread.

I reported my experience here in many places around EEV forum (here, here and here and there's more for sure).

I have seen these issues happen in many different environments and with different levels of internal charge - the one that usually is the worst case due to the cost of the equipment is when a battery is left alone in a device with a soft power button, which gets discharged little by little.

My recovery process is also with vinegar followed by isopropyl alcohol

[Fungus]

Update:

The leak happened at the end where the spring forms a "U" shape to connect the two batteries together. I just pulled that bit of metal out (it comes out quite easily), washed it with water, and... it came up like new!



The meter is working again.

[Electro Fan]

Update:

The leak happened at the end where the spring forms a "U" shape to connect the two batteries together. I just pulled that bit of metal out (it comes out quite easily), washed it with water, and... it came up like new!



The meter is working again.

Nice work.

My experience is that cleaning battery leaks generally restores operation - just depends on how bad the leak was and how hard you work at the cleaning process.  Your cleaning came out beautiful.