Originally Posted by
User1
I just looked at what CostCo is charging for quality alkaline batteries and it's about $.50 per AA battery. This is pretty much a one time cost and will last for years if you invest in a pack of 48. The battery stays charged for years and even after a charge it stays charged, not sure for how long as I never really looked in to it. I do know that it would easily be a year.
BTW, does anyone have any prices they'd like to throw out there on what they're paying for the NiMH?
The per cell cost is certainly higher with NiMH, but I find the life-cycle cost to be far less. I pay about $2/cell for NiMH, but they've been giving me well over 500 full charge cycles before starting to drop in capacity. So the cost per charge is less than 0.4 cents (plus about 0.1 cents for the electric power per charge). In comparison, you indicate a cost per alkaline cell of $0.50 and in my experience you'll get fewer than 10 charge cycles - and only that many if you are careful to never let the charge state get much below 50%. So on average maybe about 5 effective full charge cycles. That makes the cost per full charge cycle about 10 cents or about 20 times as high as for NiMH. [And that's before considering the possible costs due to damaged electronics from an alkaline cell that wasn't meant to be recharged and ends up leaking as a result.]