Can a $2.50 gadget extend alkaline battery life by 800%?

[Chaz_Larson]

Still available!

[anon26940528]

I remember one ad for a doohickey that basically required you to inject water into your engine. At the time [I wrote about it][1] that I didn’t know as much about engines as I do now, but it was still hilarious.

With regards to this (maybe) slim joule thief, my guess is that it either works and destroys devices that can’t take the increased voltage of the fully charged battery when boosted, or that it doesn’t work at all. There doesn’t seem to be enough room for digital circuitry to make it smart. Generally though, I avoid exposing the circuitry of my expensive belongings to magnetic fields that they weren’t designed to operate with. Perhaps overly paranoid, but I can’t wait to see someone try this is an induction charger and rechargeable batteries. Could be interesting.
[1]: http://mychemicaljourney.blogspot.com/2008_08_30_archive.html

[Flossaluzitarin]

I don’t get it. Miser water-injection engines (used to be common in Japan, for city use) worked okay. But someone put it forth as a ‘power of hydrogen’ bit like it made your engine a 7800K hydroxy torch instead of something that barely helped you hypermile by slipping (mechanical analogs of) vitamin K in there and working your ECS hard (with new ROMs)?

Let’s see them put demo batterizers on substations. Heh heh.

[anon26940528]

@Flossaluzitarin

Miser water-injection engines (used to be common in Japan, for city use) worked okay. But someone put it forth as a ‘power of hydrogen’ bit like it made your engine a 7800K hydroxy torch instead of something that barely helped you hypermile by slipping (mechanical analogs of) vitamin K in there and working your ECS hard (with new ROMs)?

I don’t even think it does that much, from what I recall (link is long dead) it very inefficiently electrolyzed water (but really just probably dripped water into your cylinders. No timing, no aftermarket injection system, just tubes going from the electrolysis chamber to each of the cylinders.

[Gyrofrog]

[billstewart]

I don’t know if the 800% number is realistic, but I’ve had a number of electrical or electronic devices that meet the use case for this thing - they really want 1.5 volts, and stop working if the voltage drops much below 1.4 or 1.3, so non-rechargeable batteries don’t last very long even though they’ve got plenty of power left that could be used in non-picky applications, and rechargeable NiMH batteries don’t have enough voltage to make them happy.

The solution I really liked for this problem was Nickel Zinc rechargeables, which run about 1.6v, but unfortunately they seem to have vanished from the market shortly after I bought one batch and started looking for more.

I asked a question about whether this gadget would work with NiMH batteries and the answer I got back was “Sort of” - it’ll give you the voltage you want, but draining NiMHs enough that the voltage drops below 0.7v or so can seriously shorten their lifetime, and this gadget doesn’t have a low-voltage shutoff because it’s trying to pull all the juice it can get out of a disposable battery.

[LDoBe]

I’ve tried NiMH batteries in lots of devices, and I’ve never been impressed by their performance. Especially in high-powered LED flashlights. They start off at about 60% as bright as regular alkalines, and then run out in half the time, and if you mishandle them or discharge a little too much you might as well run your high-powered headlamp off potato power.

I kinda wish I could figure out a way to put Lithium rechargables into my good flashlights, but it would involve an awful lot of soldering (which I’m terrible at because my hands shake like I have some kind of palsy (thanks a lot 10+ years of stimulant medication)), and I fear that if I just drop in a 3.7v cell, it’ll be too much voltage for my 3v systems.

[lolipop_jones]

Water injection was common in high-performance airplane engines. If I only had a car with a Pratt & Whitney R-4360, I’d be able to give you a user report.

[anon26940528]

@lolipop_jones

Water injection was common in high-performance airplane engines. If I only had a car with a Pratt & Whitney R-4360, I’d be able to give you a user report.

Water injection is more than jar of water that you attach to your cylinders after you drill holes in them. I wish the link was still around so you could see how absurd it was.

[shaddack]

This just in time. (include from Hackaday.com):

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Crowdfunding Follies: Debunking The Batteriser

[shaddack]

@Gyrofrog

I remember about 25 years ago when someone claimed that coloring the inner plastic ring of a CD with a highlighter pen would improve the sound quality.

In an even more amusing note, marker pen can break some DRM schemes on CDs.

Marker pens, sticky tape crack music CD protection

[shaddack]

@ActionAbe

There doesn’t seem to be enough room for digital circuitry to make it smart.

There’s usually a plenty of space for digital electronics. See the MicroSemi IGLOO Nano FPGA chips.
http://www.microsemi.com/products/fpga-soc/fpga/igloo-nano

Or, better, the Freescale’s KL03, an Arm microcontroller with 1.6x2mm size.

Freescale makes the world's smallest ARM controller chip even tinier

Yes, the smudge on the golf ball is the chip.

@billstewart

I don’t know if the 800% number is realistic, but I’ve had a number of electrical or electronic devices that meet the use case for this thing - they really want 1.5 volts, and stop working if the voltage drops much below 1.4 or 1.3, so non-rechargeable batteries don’t last very long even though they’ve got plenty of power left that could be used in non-picky applications, and rechargeable NiMH batteries don’t have enough voltage to make them happy.

You can always reengineer the thing with a Li-ion battery and optionally a DC-DC converter.

Or perhaps a supercap and contactless charging; a TV remote could last a couple hours on such cap, maybe days, and charge at the moment of putting it on the table.

@LDoBe

I kinda wish I could figure out a way to put Lithium rechargables into my good flashlights, but it would involve an awful lot of soldering (which I’m terrible at because my hands shake like I have some kind of palsy (thanks a lot 10+ years of stimulant medication)), and I fear that if I just drop in a 3.7v cell, it’ll be too much voltage for my 3v systems.

Teach someone around to solder (hopefully you can get somebody interested). (Or find out a way to rest your wrists. It works when soldering 0.1mm pads under a microscope, may scale up to “macroscopic” sizes.)

As of voltage, that depends on the system. New batteries are often above the rated voltage, so at least for a short time it should be okay (for long time too if it does not overheat). You can also add a silicon diode in series that will drop the 0.7 volts; I am using a stack of diodes to drop voltage from 19V to below 18V, so I can use my programmable charger (which refuses to go above 18V, they should get it to at least 24V for truck use…) with a 19V laptop power brick. (And voila, another power supply I don’t have to carry.)