Originally Posted by
wphamilton
Good, but misses the point IMO. When your low-power applications require infrequent battery changes, you may never recoup the higher initial cost. Added to the fact that the alkaline batteries may hold their charge for years, where the rechargeable ones self-discharge in a month or two, non-rechargeable are better choices for things like backup batteries in electronics, emergency lights, wall clocks. Even in something like my wireless keyboard, the length of time to get a payback makes using the rechargeable problematic.
Put it in perspective: the alkaline battery is 25-30 cents. If I'm replacing that in a year in my low current draw device, what's 25 cents compared to changing and recharging the battery 10 or 15 times? My kid's game controller, of course rechargeable! Alarm clock backup, that would be silly.
It doesn't entirely miss the point. But it does depend on your usage. Yes, if you have lots of low drain and few high drain applications, then Alkalines seem the cheapest. But I have just had to throw out a wall clock I forgot to change over to NiMH due to a leaked Alkaline.
If you have a lot of high drain applications, then mixing standard NiMH and LSD NiMH becomes more viable, as the cost per cell and for the charger is shared across a greater number of batteries.
Don't forget that Eneloops hold upto 95% of their charge for 1 year and 70% of their charge for 5 years.
The figures I showed above deliberately picked expensive NiMH vs cheap-ish Alkaline. You can spend more on Alky's if you wish, you can also get better deals on NiMH and LSD. When you can buy 20 Eneloop with a decent charger (maybe not a c9000) for about £40, it really does become cost effective. Just check out fle-bay.
As to charges.
I doubt I would see 180 charges, let alone 500 (are you looking at the XX eneloops which are 500 charges? - the standard are 1800 charges, but a lower capacity)
even at 1/10th of their rated charges through abuse, you are looking at a substantial lifetime.
I said before, 180 charges at 1/week it 3 1/2 years, charge on average 1/month and that is 15 years. So high claimed life-cycles can be relatively ignored.
[Edit]
I missed that last bit. With a LSD NiMH you wouldn't need to replace and recharge 10 or 15 times. With a standard NiMH you might, but with a LSD NiMH you might have to replace it once, if at all in that same year. But instead of having to wait for it to charge you could have another pre-charged and ready to go.
To be fair, even if the cost per cell/charge is higher for NiMH (LSD or not), it is negligible and just think of all the batteries that you are not pouring in landfill as a result.