How good are battery chargers ?

Hi Y'all,

While I have one wind-up powered flashlight and I am considering getting more wind-up powered stuff, I still already have a lot of battery powered stuff and don't want to have to keep buying new batteries all the time, but also would have to buy too many batteries to pay the high price of batteries specifically labeled as "rechargable" as they are very pricey.

There are battery chargers out there that say they can recharge pretty much any type of battery, even the regular alkaline batteries, as anyone had much success with these when charging "regular" batteries (batteries not specifically labeled as "rechargable") ?

We bought one recently and while they do recharge regular batteries somewhat (I tried recharging alkline batteries), it does not seem to bring them back to full power, maybe about 50-60% power judging by the brightness of a flashlight beam.

Can you expect the same from all such chargers or are some chargers simply much inferior in quality and better ones can be found ?

Or is it is just that batteries that are not specifically labeled as "rechargable" just simply can not effectively be recharged to near full power ?

(I don't want to have to buy several brands of chargers just to find out it would not make any big difference)

Ideally it will be neat whenever we could reach a point where all our portable electronics are wind-up powered and using batteries would be the rare exception

Thanks in advance for any help !

Gary

don't waste your time recharging alkaline batteries, invest your money in quality LSD nimh or lithium ion batteries and well made chargers. They will pay for themselves over time many times over while recharging alkalines will have depleting results with severely increased chances of leakage that will destroy your stuff. Wind up powered stuff is IMO only useful when you cannot get to a power source most of the time to recharge your batteries. I avoid windup stuff like the plague now I have a stockpile of rechargeable batteries and car/home chargers.

Buy a 4-pack of Eneloops with a charger - it's $15. Using them in a 2xAA flashlight will give you 2000-3000 charge cycles. With my flashlight, that's using it for around 8 hours a day (High and Moonlight mode) for 6 years. And then I spend about $12 to buy 4 more Eneloops. How much would alkaleaks cost for that long? What if they leak and damage my light?

High-drain - never alkaleak. Worse performance by alkaleaks, more likely to leak
Low-drain - maybe alkaleak. Better performance by alkaleak, will eventually leak

Lynx_Arc said:

don't waste your time recharging alkaline batteries, invest your money in quality LSD nimh or lithium ion batteries and well made chargers. They will pay for themselves over time many times over while recharging alkalines will have depleting results with severely increased chances of leakage that will destroy your stuff. Wind up powered stuff is IMO only useful when you cannot get to a power source most of the time to recharge your batteries. I avoid windup stuff like the plague now I have a stockpile of rechargeable batteries and car/home chargers.

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Thanks for the reply, rechargeable batteries would not be too bad if I didn't need to get so many of them

No offense intended, but I think the wind-up powered stuff is neat and could come in very handy if you were on a camping trip or if there was an extended power outage, or if you just simply did not happen to have any batteries recharged to use.

The wind up flashlight I have works very well, and just 15-20 seconds of cranking gives enough light for when I need to use it here and there.

The wind-up powered radios I have read about only need about a minute or two of cranking to play for about an hour so that's not bad either.

(tha battery companies and their resellers might not be too happy with the wind-up power industry, perhaps they need to invest in also making such products themselves

AnAppleSnail said:

Buy a 4-pack of Eneloops with a charger - it's $15. Using them in a 2xAA flashlight will give you 2000-3000 charge cycles. With my flashlight, that's using it for around 8 hours a day (High and Moonlight mode) for 6 years. And then I spend about $12 to buy 4 more Eneloops. How much would alkaleaks cost for that long? What if they leak and damage my light?

High-drain - never alkaleak. Worse performance by alkaleaks, more likely to leak
Low-drain - maybe alkaleak. Better performance by alkaleak, will eventually leak

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Yea, that is a shame how after so many many years of technology they still have on the market regular batteries that are not leakproof :ironic:

Astroscanner said:

Thanks for the reply, rechargeable batteries would not be too bad if I didn't need to get so many of them

No offense intended, but I think the wind-up powered stuff is neat and could come in very handy if you were on a camping trip or if there was an extended power outage, or if you just simply did not happen to have any batteries recharged to use.

The wind up flashlight I have works very well, and just 15-20 seconds of cranking gives enough light for when I need to use it here and there.

The wind-up powered radios I have read about only need about a minute or two of cranking to play for about an hour so that's not bad either.

(tha battery companies and their resellers might not be too happy with the wind-up power industry, perhaps they need to invest in also making such products themselves

Click to expand...

the miniscule amount of power that winding provides normal batteries can run the device for days even weeks with no winding. You would have to be on a long camping trip away from any power source or have no access to any power that windups would come into play. Most people that are experiencing such outages tend to look into solar charging instead because winding every hour is very annoying people do not like stuff that dies after such short runtimes using such low power.

Rechargable batteries are not just marked with "rechargable". They use completely different technologies.

Normal rechargable batteries are NiMH, while normal non rechargable batteries are made with Alkaline technology. Besides the obvious fact that alkaline batteries cannot be charged, they are also useless for more than 90% of the flashlights you will find on this forum.

They can't sustain anywhere close to the power drain that the NiMH batteries can, and as a result any powerful electric device will function poorly on them. Alkaline batteries are based on very old technology and are no good in anything but low drain devices like clocks, remote controls and small radios.

Never ever try to charge alkaline batteries, as they are not suppose to handle it, and they will leak. No reputable company will make chargers for Alkaline batteries.

Actually alkalines can be (limitedly) recharged. I have recharged several with varying results but typically you are lucky to get 75% of the capacity you had to begin with and are at extreme risk of leakage if you don't recharge them at very low current levels for very long periods of time. It is not worth the hassle and risk of recharging them IMO. I had a 6v flat alkaline battery for a remote that costs about $7 to replace and it had to be replaced about once a year so I once recharged it and it lasted 5 months before quitting. The second recharge lasted about 2 months, I then proceeded to solder 3AAAs in series instead and it lasted 9 months in use costing about $1 instead of $7. The tv set was retired 9 years ago.