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Rechargeable Batteries and Chargers, by Pat Cascio
Disclaimer: I make no pretense that I’m an expert in electronics, batteries, or devices that use batteries in them. However, as I’ve stated numerous times in my SurvivalBlog articles, I’m a serious student, and I’m always increasing my learning curve on many subjects. I have many devices that use all battery sizes, with AA and AAA batteries being the most commonly used batteries. We were always buying batteries and would rotate through them, all to no avail! Before we could rotate through our battery supply, some of the Alkaline batteries would already be dead or leaking. That’s not a good thing in a survival situation. Additionally, no matter how well you store your batteries, the shelf life isn’t nearly as long as you believe it is.
In the past two months, I’ve had to replace the four AAA batteries in my tv remote, five times! Furthermore, when these batteries gave up the ghost, they didn’t give any hint that they were getting low; the tv remote just stopped working, period! According to the packages that these batteries came from, they were only a couple years old, and none were leaking.
Many of today’s hi-intensity, small flashlights operate off of either AA or AAA batteries, and some of these lights can take as many as four batteries. Sure, these little flashlights have a good run time with many running up to six hours, depending on the lumens settings. Still, these little batteries can only last so long in a device or sitting on your shelf.
Over the years, I’ve been buying various types and brands of rechargeable AA and AAA batteries and experimenting with them. First off, don’t believe what the package says about how many times you can recharge the batteries…not even close. Secondly, the packages state that the batteries are good for “X” number of years; nope! Then we have the statement that says “batteries come fully charged”. Well, that hasn’t always been my experience, as many needed to be charged before I could use them. In all honesty, it really doesn’t seem to matter what brand name is stamped on the batteries, they all seem to work about as well as the other brand.
Now we have the actually battery chargers. Some of the rechargeable batteries actually come with a charger for free! However, don’t get your hopes up as to how well these chargers work or how long it takes to recharge several batteries. In my experience, some of these charges can take as long as a day to recharge your batteries. Now, while that may not be a big issue right now, in a grid down situation when you need to use your gas-powered generator to recharge your batteries, do you really want to run your generator all day long to recharge your batteries? Do you have the fuel to keep your generator going for as long as it may take to keep those batteries charged up? Probably not!
We also need to keep in mind which devices use up our batteries faster than others.
Source: http://survivalblog.com/rechargeable-batteries-and-chargers-by-pat-cascio/
