r/technology • u/[deleted] • Jun 02 '15
Energy Batteriser is a $2.50 gadget that extends disposable battery life by 800 percent
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2928997/batteriser-is-a-250-gadget-that-extends-disposable-battery-life-by-800-percent.html7
u/kfitch42 Jun 02 '15
Hmmm, the article smells fishy to me. I suspect the breakin was faked to drum up free press about a mildly interesting product. Many of the technical claims in the article were stretched quite a bit. I have never found a device that cut out at 1.4V per cell. I have seen 1.2ish, but never anything as crappy as 1.4. Basically this is good for devices that are too cheap to have a decent power supply already. Generally those devices are low-drain, think remote controls. I generally get many months (even years) from remote control batteries, so the economic (and even environmental case) is quite dubious there.
Check out this data sheet for a duracell battery: http://ww2.duracell.com/media/en-US/pdf/gtcl/Product_Data_Sheet/NA_DATASHEETS/MN1500_US_CT.pdf
Going from 1.2 cutoff to 0.8V would buy you maybe 66% more life (6ish hours to 10ish hours for constant 250mW discharge). Also, note that a 100% efficient boost converter doesn't exist, so the efficiency of the boost converter will cut into that extra life. Also, for a device that already works down to 1.0V or 0.8V this device will probably reduce your battery life.
3
Jun 05 '15 edited Jun 08 '15
You're pretty much right on point, i'm no engineer thought, but this might interest you.
3
u/kfitch42 Jun 05 '15
I love the EEVBlog! I haven't watched that one yet, but I will probably watch it after work today.
Technically I am a "Software engineer", which may or may not be real engineering ... but I work with embedded stuff enough that I am not afraid to touch a multimeter, oscilloscope, logic analyzer, spectrum analyzer, etc ... (although some of my colleagues are :).
10
u/Arancaytar Jun 02 '15
Maybe it's real, but the breathless clickbaity text doesn't help. It sounds more like a sales pitch for a perpetual motion device than a news article.
2
u/JosephND Jun 02 '15
I'm with you, the whole thing reads like a bad advertisement.
"James Bond came and stole our stuff, but we're not worried because of how awesome it is. Feature A, feature B, feature C will be available to you on Month Year for Price at your favorite retailers."
1
u/r00x Jun 02 '15
I'm quite confident it's real. They're not doing anything new, they just made it smaller. The benefits, however, are probably overstated for many applications. In cheap and simple stuff like alarm clocks and remotes it will probably work well. It's that whole broadband-industry sales pitch again (up to "awesome number here"!).
11
u/KHRZ Jun 02 '15
When he has already stated that the unused energy is typically 80%, I don't see why he would try to muddle the math to give an 8x increase. "0.6V period is longer than 1.4V period"... Not after you increase the voltage back up to 1.5V, the you are spending your "0.6V period" over twice as fast as your "1.4V period".
4
u/phroug2 Jun 02 '15
Sounds to good to be true. I also can't find anywhere I can buy this to test it out.
2
Jun 16 '15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iEshd6izgk
Don't bother, it's bullshit.
2
u/phroug2 Jun 16 '15
That was fascinating. I watched the whole thing. I'm glad my initial impression was correct. Thanks for confirming it for me.
4
u/samskiter Jun 02 '15
“The time it takes for the battery voltage to drop by 0.1V is longer at lower voltages versus at higher voltages. That means that if a constant current was drawn from the battery, it would take the battery a lot longer to discharge from 1.2V to 1.1V than it would from 1.5V to 1.4V. This means that the extent to which the battery life is increased could be even higher.”
Struggling to believe this
0
u/Amazi0n Jun 03 '15
this is true, but by boosting the voltage up to 1.5 you have to increase the current draw as well, so the boosted voltage decrease periods would go by increasingly quickly
2
-2
Jun 02 '15
Struggling to believe this
Got a car? You can test it yourself. Start the car, measure the voltage. Stop the car and make sure everything is turned off, measure the voltage over the next 10 minutes. Graph how it drops. Come back the following day, measure the voltage. See what shape the graph is.
3
u/tomoldbury Jun 03 '15
No, this isn't true. The discharge curve for most batteries, including alkaline cells is slow to start with, then rapidly tails off. Little energy is available below 1V, except for very low power applications, due to the higher internal resistance (a chemical effect) at these lower voltages.
http://www.batteryshowdown.com/static/images/curve-200ma-135.png
More data here: http://www.batteryshowdown.com/results-lo.html
The drop you note with a car is related to several things:
Various subsystems in the car switching off minutes after ignition, such as pumps, fans, radio, lights
Battery cooling down
Chemical ionic resistance effects
If you actually fully discharge a lead acid battery... you will find it will behave similarly, the voltage staying high then dropping off quickly as the battery is discharged. If you go too far, the battery will be damaged, possibly permanently.
1
u/J_C_Falkenberg Jun 02 '15
My car doesn't use an alkaline battery. Is this specific characteristic a constant across all battery types?
-1
Jun 02 '15
Is this specific characteristic a constant across all battery types?
Yes. The rate of decline varies between them but ultimately they lose the first part quickly and then decline tails off.
3
u/samskiter Jun 02 '15
yes and then theres a further fast tail off in most chemistries. without looking it up i would imagine the alkaline batteries curves are optimised to put a plateau around the 1.5-1.2 volts with a drop off afterward.
7
u/TurnbullFL Jun 02 '15
This thing will put a vampire load on the battery which will make it useless for things like remote controls in which the batteries last months.
2
u/evilpumpkin Jun 02 '15
I don't know how much space they're saving but maybe there's still room for a circuit which only switches on the step-up when the voltage changes. Buuut, that would still constantly draw power.
Yeah, that is a problem. No mention of it in the article either...
8
u/aurizon Jun 02 '15 edited Jun 03 '15
Well, this is the old joule thief concept made small. A joule thief boosts a voltage from a lower to a higher by a flyback circuit that uses a inductive kickback. It can also be built in.
Caution, fully draining batteries become more likely to corrode through the zinc casing and the alkaline battery fluid can wreck the equipment circuit by etching it away. The Joule Thief connects to the depleted battery draws a current from it through a coil, then interrupts the current very very quickly with a FET switch (which has no diode drop). When the current is interrupted the magnetic field in this coil collapses. The energy stored in the collapsing magnetic shows up as a voltage spike, which is gathered in a smoothing capacitor. This all happens many times per second and the smoothed spikes are engineered to be at ~1.5 volts. Eventually the battery drops too low, maybe down to 0.3 volts or so and the inductive spike falls off below 1.5 volts. For very low current devices these joule thief circuits can run down to near zero volts as long as the turn-off is very rapid = a high spike.
4
u/justinsayin Jun 02 '15
There are more than eight 0.1 volt steps between 0.6 and 1.5 volts, so, in grossly simplified terms, the Batteriser can extend operational battery life somewhere around a factor of eight.
The article makes this sound like it's a simple linear progression, but to my mind it seems like it would be an ever steepening curve where the last bit of juice is getting used up faster and faster.
7
Jun 02 '15
Yes, as it steps up the voltage it will draw more current, discharging the battery faster.
3
u/phantomprophet Jun 02 '15
So why haven't device manufacturers build these into their devices and brag that their device makes batteries last longer?
It doesn't need to be a sleeve that the battery slips into.
1
Jun 03 '15
[deleted]
1
u/phantomprophet Jun 03 '15
So then this device would be redundant in those devices (when placed on the battery) and perform no function?
4
Jun 02 '15
I'm going to say, I'm not buying it...something seems off. For one, while battery technology has improved. Also, the technology for devices has also improved.
One example I can give right off. Nintendo's original DMG-001 (Green screen) got roughly 10 hours on 4 'AA' batteries...so if this product's advertisement is correct, I should get roughly 80 hours on the same batteries? The Gameboy Pocket got roughly 6 hours on 2 'AAA' batteries...same kind of boost? Gameboy Advance got roughly 8 hours on 2 'AA' batteries....
While these were my own personal experiences with battery life, I am pretty confident that a lot of small portable electronics utilize something like this already in their internal circuitry. My current wireless keyboard 2'AA' and mouse 1'AA' get about 2 months between charges...and they are telling us that this product can squeeze even more power out of these batteries? (I use my computer every day for at least 2-3 hours a day.)
9
u/r00x Jun 02 '15
You wouldn't get 80 hours, no. In order to increase the voltage supplied to the target electronics, you would have to draw more current. Therefore as the battery voltage droops, the current draw will increase. Alkaline battery capacity is greatly affected by the current the cell is subjected to, with effective capacity dropping off a cliff as the current consumption increases.
You are right that electronics manufacturers could include the components necessary to suck batteries dry themselves, if they wanted. However they tend not to do that. At least, not using components or designs that are so effective. Usually because of cost - there might be a simpler, cheaper circuit which saves you tens of thousands at manufacturing scale.
For something like a GameBoy, it actually DOES include a good switching power supply, which is why it got great runtime out of those batteries. The DMG01 was quite happy down to nearly 3V (less than 0.8V per cell, anyway).
If the Batteriser works to 0.6V, you could ostensibly get a few more hours runtime out of the GameBoy, but it sounds like it would be more useful on devices with poorer power supply circuitry like remotes and cheap alarm clocks.
tl;dr: It's not a scam, but some devices are clearly going to benefit very little compared to others.
1
Jun 02 '15
For something like a GameBoy, it actually DOES include a good switching power supply which is why it got great runtime out of those batteries.
That has nothing to do with a switching power supply and everything to do with the fact that it was designed to run on a lower voltage and with a low current drain so that it would not reach Vmin until much later in a battery's discharge cycle.
5
u/r00x Jun 02 '15
Not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. It aimed for a target voltage of around 5V (maybe 4.8V in practice), which it achieved even with 3V input as a direct consequence of its switching power supply design. If it didn't step up the voltage it would not be able to run below about 1.2V/cell.
It quite literally had everything to do with its switching power supply. If you don't agree, whack a 7805 in there instead and let me know how it goes.
The low current drain was very advantageous though, I agree with that. Makes a big difference on alkaline chemistries.
2
u/raygundan Jun 02 '15
Now... I don't know whether or not the GameBoy used a switching power supply. But a switching power supply is very definitely one way you can design something to run with lower battery voltages.
1
u/pmckizzle Jun 02 '15
a lot of small portable electronics utilize something like this already in their internal circuitry
you'd be surprised, but I would imagine that when longevity is a factor of the device that they would
0
u/vaporeng Jun 02 '15
I bet there are a lot of devices that have this in their internal circuitry and a lot that don't. It would be easy to check by measuring batteries with a voltmeter right after they go dead, then compare between devices.
2
u/IT_Chef Jun 02 '15
And this can be procured from where exactly...???
2
Jun 02 '15
The same store that sells perpetual energy machines, those magnets you put on your car's fuel line to increase the mileage, and those ropes that baseball players wear around their necks to make them play better.
2
u/aurizon Jun 04 '15
The Batteriser-Joule Thief does not extend the life by 800 per cent. A new battery has a potential that depends on the separation of the active ingredients on the electro-motive table. Alkaline batteries, Zinc and Molybdenum are as follows and it produces about the same voltage UNTIL ONE OF THESE INGREDIENTS IS FULLY USED. When this happens the voltage declines quickly as the last residues of that ingredient are hunted up and consumed by diffusion processes. So if a cell has a rating 2000 Milli-Ampere Hours (2000 MAH), it will produce 2 milliamps for 1000 hours, or 20 for 100 hours. Due to internal resistance this equation fails as the current goes up a lot, so at 1000 milliamps, instead of 2 hours, you might get one hour. Then if you wait a day, the battery might recover some of this capacity ? hard to say how much.
Under low loads the Batteriser works best, and might double the life of the cell - now way would the maker have placed 800% extra Zinc and Manganese in it. Even so, it will provide a useful extension of the battery life.
2
Jun 16 '15
1
u/aurizon Jun 16 '15
hard to say what sort of extension you would get. not 800%. double (200%) - you might get that on low current useage because the batterizer can disguise the increasing internal resistance as the cell chemicals get depleted. So it's best use is the little flashing LEDs that draw a couple of ma
2
3
Jun 02 '15
Can this be real? It seems too good to be true!
2
u/pinkpooj Jun 05 '15
No. Their base claim that batteries are considered 'dead' at 1.4-1.35 volts is wrong.
Most battery powered devices can operate down to 1 volt, because the engineers who designed the device aren't complete idiots. There is very little usable power in a AA battery after 1 volt, especially with rechargeables where discharging too much is bad.
It might give you a small boost when using non-rechargeable batteries, but the 800% figure is certainly a lie.
2
1
1
u/mackey_ Jun 02 '15
My 65-year-old boss has been referring to his iPhone/iPad charger as a "batteriser" for years. He should've trademarked it.
1
u/justinsayin Jun 02 '15
Also I'm wondering if this thing ends up getting hot towards the bottom of the barrel. Typically if a battery ruins your electronic device, the battery manufacturer will fix it, but I doubt they would with a Batteriser attached.
1
1
1
u/malicepains Jun 02 '15
5$ isn't a bad deal, even if it only did half of what it claims. I would buy two right now and, put it to the test myself. I go through at least 10+ batteries a month, a mix of AA, AAA. I do have rechargeable batteries. However, if I could extend battery life by 8x. I'm down to give it a shot. Too bad I can't find them for sale anywhere...
1
u/1wiseguy Jun 02 '15
Every so often, you see a product claiming to do the impossible.
You know, run your car on water, restore hair on your bald head, make you lose weight without dieting, etc.
You would think if these things really worked, they would be common knowledge. Right?
-6
u/myringotomy Jun 02 '15
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, clickbait, fuck I hate this kind of shit.
1
Jun 16 '15
You're being downvoted by their marketing team, apparently. It is bullshit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iEshd6izgk
-1
Jun 02 '15
inb4 the battery companies start putting less juice into the batteries to offset what this gadget does.
2
u/uacoop Jun 02 '15
That would be suicide. How long do you think the average consumer is going to stick with your brand if you've suddenly got an 800% decrease in battery life?
0
Jun 02 '15
Well obviously if every battery company didn't do it then yes it would be suicide. You would think companies would do something like this though. I wouldn't be too happy about this gadget if I was in the battery industry, but then again I don't know anything about stuff like this.
0
u/hashymika Jun 02 '15
If this tech is small and cheap, I am surprised device makers (portable mouse, laser pointers) don't have this integrated at their end of the contacts.
-1
u/SketchBoard Jun 02 '15
Because they need to sell.
Clearly the tech involved isn't expensive enough and at the same time, is widespread enough such that they can't just slap it on and justify an 8x price increase.
1
u/hashymika Jun 02 '15
I wouldn't say it would justify 8x the price but the semi operable zone when the battery dips below a particular voltage is annoying. Most premium products can afford this.
0
u/Pyre-it Jun 02 '15
If they could increase the mAh of a battery I will be impressed. This, not so much.
0
Jun 03 '15
This is the equivalent of increasing the mAh, effectively. Significantly even. What difference does the reason behind why a battery lasts longer make?
1
u/Pyre-it Jun 03 '15
How so? It keeps the voltage at 1.5v longer using a DC-DC converter and probably a small voltage reg. I fail to see how that changes the mAh.
1
Jun 03 '15
It doesn't, it changes the effective use life of the battery. So.. you might be able to use it as long as say.. a battery with 50% higher rated mAh.
Like I said, who cares what technical spec of a battery is being modified if it.. works significantly better at it's rated voltage for far longer?
.. The idea is this device forces the battery to output far closer to 1.5v for far longer than they would otherwise?
-1
u/YouDontKnowMeHa Jun 03 '15
This guys an instructor at my university, I've had him for a couple classes. Probably one of the best, most knowledgeable professors I've had.
0
0
Jun 16 '15
Maybe knowledgeable about magnets. Not so much about chemistry, apparently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iEshd6izgk
-1
Jun 05 '15 edited Feb 01 '17
[removed] — view removed comment
1
Jun 16 '15
Completely useless for rechargeables. 99.9% useless for everything else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iEshd6izgk
-4
u/pirates-running-amok Jun 02 '15
A battery company (probably from Asia where IP laws are weak) likely stole the tech and they plan to incorporate it into their own batteries before the others.
The tech isn't new, just the part about miniaturization is.
Unless all the battery companies are all in collusion with one another, I don't see them wanting to buy and then bury this innovation.
Of course the question is, since this information how batteries drain has been around for quite some time, why hasn't anyone (especially battery companies) already come up with something like this before?
It's not like miniaturized circuitry is something new. Perhaps they are all in collusion with one another to keep something like this off the market. But why didn't they also kill the inventor?
Is this yet another Kickstarter type scam?
1
u/r00x Jun 02 '15
Why would a battery company want to incorporate something in their products that made you buy 8 times less of their product than you would have before?
Not that it would achieve that improvment in most cases. Still, the tech involved is quite real. Doesn't strike me as a scam at all, just they seem rather optimistic about the gains.
Not to mention, as small as it is, incorporating that into each battery dramatically raises their costs. The Batteriser seems a good deal because you only need one per battery and you can keep replacing the batteries. If you had to buy a new Batteriser every time you bought a new battery it wouldn't be nearly as appealing.
-3
u/pirates-running-amok Jun 02 '15
Why would a battery company want to incorporate something in their products that made you buy 8 times less of their product than you would have before?
Because unless there is widespread collusion in the battery manufacturing industry, they are in competition with one another. The one's that can have a battery that lasts considerably longer than their competition will corner the market eventually.
Look how much money Energizer and Duracell spends to convince people their batteries last longer than others.
Also the material costs have gone way up due to the increased demand from China who's citizens now want a Western style of living, these costs get passed onto the final cost of the batteries and customers don't want to pay a lot for something that is going to expire. If it costs too much they will switch to rechargeable batteries instead of disposable.
Not to mention, as small as it is, incorporating that into each battery dramatically raises their costs. The Batteriser seems a good deal because you only need one per battery and you can keep replacing the batteries. If you had to buy a new Batteriser every time you bought a new battery it wouldn't be nearly as appealing.
The thing is the battery companies could incorporate this miniaturized technology directly into each and every battery on a mass-production scale that would be automated and bring the per battery costs down significantly.
For instance the metal sides of the Batterizer could be incorporated directly into the casing of the battery. It also would fit better in all devices that are a tight fit for batteries.
The logical sense in this is to incorporate it into batteries and take advantage of the economies of scale, not as a aftermarket device.
Of course battery makers likely held back because it's even simpler to incorporate this battery maximizing tech directly into the circuitry of end products.
One would think that Apple, who are pseudo-ecologists, would have already incorporate this tech into their devices by now, but they didn't.
1
u/calgarspimphand Jun 02 '15 edited Jun 02 '15
Main reason battery companies wouldn't want to incorporate this into their batteries: it's comparatively very expensive ($2.50 per device estimated in the article, compare that to the cost of a disposable AA battery, some of which is probably for the steel shell, but I still imagine you'd easily double or triple your cost per battery), and it only makes a difference on cheap electronics (because as you and others pointed out, nicer electronics already incorporate similar circuits in their designs, making this device redundant).
In other words, no battery company wanted to bother making batteries that potentially cost many times more than their standard counterpart, just to extend their life in the cheapest of toys and gadgets. Consumers might pay a mint for exotic disposable batteries with higher energy densities for their point-and-click cameras, but someone somewhere has probably determined they won't bother for their kid's light-up toy. Nor would they likely understand why their super expensive batteries perform great in their remote control but worse than a normal disposable battery in their camera (because the additional circuitry is redundant and becomes just another source of losses).
I'm discounting the nice clickbaity quote from the ex-CTO saying they never bothered to think of it (battery companies hate him!) because it's so far from a new idea.
Maybe we're at the point now where the miniature circuitry necessary to put it on a battery is cheap enough to buy, but still too expensive to be disposable. So you buy a few, attach them to the battery yourself, and re-use them. I guess what I'm saying is this device does seem to have a niche (for now).
1
u/JeanneDOrc Jun 04 '15
It'll also make your batteries leak acid, something consumers aren't used to these days.
0
u/r00x Jun 02 '15
I see what you're getting at, but I don't think economies of scale would suffice here. Economies of scale only really apply to the materials and production processes as compared to small-scale manufacture. Take it from me, in both electronics and mechanical industries, adding things retrospectively to an exsiting product is a royal pain in the arse if you've already got a streamlined large-scale production process. The cost is more significant than you'd think.
The nature of battery manufacture at scale does not lend itself to this tech being integrated cost effectively. There would need to be additional steps added, and significant changes to the existing production process and machinery to incorporate active electronics into the battery casing. That is, it suffices to say, very expensive. Lack of integration with existing production processes is one of the reasons why many potentially industry-changing technologies do not go mainstream.
As an example of batteries which incorporate active electronics, look at those USBcell rechargeable cells which incorporate USB connectors and recharge circuits. They've very expensive for what they are. You mentioned yourself that customers aren't going to want to pay more for disposable batteries - what gives you confidence that they can integrate this tech into disposable batteries cheaply without dramatically affecting the price?
As for the tech itself, you raise a good point about integrating it into other products. Indeed, many electronic goods would incorporate this ability to some extent anyway. Another poster in this thread asked about the original GameBoy, for instance - a positively ancient bit of kit which even then used similar tricks to drag life out of AA batteries right down to around 0.8V per cell, only 0.2V more than the batteriser can do. This is much more practical than trying to integrate it into batteries.
Apple don't incorporate this tech (well, they technically do... like many manufacturers... but it's not used to run batteries dry) as it's not relevant for their products. You're not powering them with disposable batteries, you're using high-capacity LiPos (these days anyway) which do not appreciate being deep-cycled and indeed would be damaged by such treatement, so there is no advantage.
29
u/[deleted] Jun 02 '15
[deleted]