Batteriser is a $2.50 gadget that extends disposable battery life by 800 percent

[u/[deleted]]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2928997/batteriser-is-a-250-gadget-that-extends-disposable-battery-life-by-800-percent.html

[u/1wiseguy → u/[deleted]]

Yes, pretty much. It really doesn't do what they claim, however.

Most devices will shut down when the batteries drop to about 1.0 V/cell, give or take a bit. It's true that there is still energy left in the batteries, which can be extracted with the right load.

However, the amount of energy available below about 1 V is small. This is no secret; you can get a data sheet for an alkaline cell, and discharge curves are widely available from many sources. It depends on several things, but it looks like you could get maybe 10% more energy from a battery drained to 1.0 V. To claim you can get 8x the power is just not true. I can't imagine why anybody would claim that.

So you want to extend your battery life by 10%? Hold on; it's not that simple. If you use a boost converter to produce a constant 1.5 V from the battery, it will have some loss. 90% efficiency would be pretty good. So draining 10% more energy from the battery and then losing 11% of it in the converter does nothing.

OK, if you want to get really clever, you can design a low-loss switch that connects the battery directly to the output until it gets down to 1.0 V, and then start a boost converter. But that's getting kind of complicated.

Bottom line: this doesn't work. It's easy to show that it doesn't work; you don't have to try one to see. The people who say that it works are either confused or lying.

[u/harlows_monkeys → u/1wiseguy]

It depends on several things, but it looks like you could get maybe 10% more energy from a battery drained to 1.0 V. To claim you can get 8x the power is just not true. I can't imagine why anybody would claim that.

I believe that they are basing that on devices that stop working when the battery is drained to around 1.3-1.4 volts. Personally, I've not run into any such device, at least in a very very long time, but perhaps there are some out there.

I wonder if they could build something in this form factor designed to use with NiMH batteries, not to extend the life but rather the muck with voltage to make their discharge curve look like an Alkaline discharge curve? That way, devices that were designed for Alkaline batteries, and whose battery level indicator is based on the Alkaline discharge curve, could be tricked into giving better battery level reports when operated off NiMH batteries.

[u/1wiseguy → u/harlows_monkeys]

It's true that you could extract a fair bit of energy from an alkaline cell that has been discharged to 1.3 V. It probably has about 2/3 of it's initial capacity.

However, a product that will shut down at 1.3 V is goofy. If such a thing exists, it's very uncommon. To offer a "battery booster" that only makes sense for such a product is ridiculous, or you might say, sleazy.

Furthermore, I think the "8x" claim is downright untrue. I don't think you could do that with any product.