ItsJustMe

The thing with recharging alkalines is that it requires you to really pay attention to charge level. If you run them dead, you probably will never be able to charge them satisfactorily again. So really if you want to get many charges out, you can only use about half a charge.

I tried both charging regular alkalines, and also the "rechargable alkalines" that were a thing a few years ago. I found neither of them to work very well unless I was committed to recharging the things at almost every opportunity, and even then, I wound up tossing cells several times a year.

For modern equipment which is designed properly, NiMH rechargables are almost certainly going to be a better bet. They have about the same total power, but it's at a lower voltage so older dumb electronics without intelligent power management may not work very long on them - they see 1.2 volts and figure the battery is already dead when in fact it's still fine.

Also, traditional NiMH had a bad problem with self-discharge - charge up a cell and 2 weeks of sitting it might be down to 50% charge without ever having used it. Buying low-self-discharge cells such as Eneloops will mostly solve that problem. This makes them suitable for very low drain applications such as remote controls and wall clocks where a single charge might be expected to keep the device running for a year or more.

So it largely depends on what equipment you're powering, and if you're using modern, high quality cells. If you are, and you have a good, intelligent charger, you really should get many hundreds of charges which means that even if you're using up a complete charge every day they'll still last years.