Bike Forums - Alkaline battery charger

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Quote:

Originally Posted by prathmann (Post 16027835)

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.]

I have yet to have a alkaline cell leak on me. Can't say the same for the NiMH I've bought in the past. Granted they're probably not the same manufacturer as yours, but I just am finding this setup far more economical. I'm seeing NiMH cells for about $4 each. These have a one year guarantee. I seriously doubt they would last for 500 charges. From my experience the alkaline batteries have been a far more economical setup. Granted I was paying about $2 per cell, but even at that, I've been far happier with what I have now.

I did take stock of things that are being powered by AA and AAA batteries around my pad and I have a really hard time grasping that someone needs to charge any of the batteries I'm using on my stuff 500 times. What the heck are you powering? Even my bike lights are no longer powered by AA or AAA batteries. OK I still have my Plant Bike lights, but the new lights are powered by Li-ion batteries.

Well thanks for the info CaptCarrot, I'll look into picking up a few of the Eneloops and throw it in to the mix. Looks like these are $3-4 a cell. Not cheap but I might be able to use it. The one year warranty doesn't inspire confidence in trying it, but I like the feedback on them. And no, I don't see myself switching.

I actually looked around the pad at what is being powered by AA and AAA and it's actually very little and at a very slow rate. I haven't come close to charging a drained alkaline and if I had any equipment to tell me the charge, it was probably in the 30% drained category.

The biggest "drainers" were the bike lights. Even then I never had a problem, but I also never drained them that bad.

Quote:

Originally Posted by wphamilton (Post 16028741)

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.