Eveready Super Heavy Duty (Carbon-Zinc) cells

[etc]

I got a lot of these Carbon-Zinc cells made by Eveready, called "Super heavy duty".

Any luck with them? What lights like them?

In Fenix L2D-CE, the Turbo and High modes are poor and the brightest mode is Medium. It's about as bright as an old 1W light, like StreamLight Luxeon, which is not all that bad, but far from bliding Cree lights.

Apparently these cells don't work well in high-drain devices. What's the Fenix consumption (mAh) on Low and Medium?

Secondly, can I get a battery converter from AA to C or D?
I don't care about run time, I just want decent brightness, even if for a short while. Would combined voltage mean better brightness?
Would that make them useful in 3W MagLite, or AAP 3W lite? How well does it work in MagLite 3AA 3W lite?

Are they better suited for radios or GPS devices, given their prefered for low drain devices?

Do they leak more often than Alkalines?

 

[Marduke]

"super heavy duty" cells should be avoided like the plague! They only have around 50% of the capacity of even the cheapest alkalines, and leak 2x as much. carbon zinc cells are :thumbsdow

 

[Mr Happy]

I have some unknown brand carbon zincs that came with a little hand-held fan I picked up over five years ago. They still run the fan strongly and show no signs of leaking. Can't speak for the Eveready brand though.

Carbon zincs perform best on low to medium loads with short periods of use and a recovery time between uses. You should be able to get about 0.5 A out of AA cells and 1.0 A from D cells without dropping the cell voltage too much. If they are available very cheaply and you don't need maximum performance then they have a place. Environmentally, they don't contain any heavy metals that would be bad for landfills.

As for leakage, I always thought alkalines "don't leak," but I have read many horror stories to the contrary. (The only alkaline leaks I have experienced myself have been with 9 V batteries.) I think leakage is much more about quality of manufacture than about cell chemistry. 9 V batteries leak more often because everything is miniaturized down to a smaller and thinner scale in their construction compared to AA cells.

Edit: I also have some "heavy duty" cells that have had daily use in a remote control for four years, and are only now wearing out. They haven't leaked either.

 

[VidPro]

super heavy duty batteries are good for devices that use short burst of energy, like say a transmitter that only transmits for a short time, because they seem to do that well. other than that, i cant think of any other application that it was a "desired" battery over a alkie even.
Also they work good for some of the stuff that people keep throwing the battery out, just to insure that they have a good cell in at the time.
Like, if you only need 1/4th the power of a alkaline, and after your use of it you toss it, they fit that application because they are cheaper, and do burst well for the life of thier capacity.
how many alkies does the medical, goverment and corporate toss out , that a heavy duty would have worked as well for the time it was used for.

a great application for them is the Kids flashlight you know the kid, the one that passes out with the light on, just replace when dead, to reduce leaking.

 

[Mr Happy]

you know the kid, the one that passes out with the light on, just replace when dead, to reduce leaking

Ah yes, disposable kids -- saves a lot of trouble with parenting!

 

[VidPro]

Ah yes, disposable kids -- saves a lot of trouble with parenting!

save on diapers too, replace when leaking.

 

[etc]

I got them inexpensevely, under 10 cents each, so I think I got an OK deal. According to the web site of the maker, their mAh is incredibly low, seems to be half that of NiMH cells.

Here is the status of what they run:

Barely run my Fenix L2D-CE, it looks like an older 1W light circa 2004. Definitely doesn't work like a Cree light.

Mini-Mag 3AA, 3W - works but somewhat dimmer, I am guessing at least 50-70% of the original lumens.

Garmin GPS receiver - it works. Attempting to do a test on it to see how many hours it gets on a set.

Uniden radio - totally doesn't work. Turns on for a few secs, and then cuts off.

 

[Mr Happy]

Assuming a 1.2 V terminal voltage at 0.45 A current drain with a fresh zinc-carbon AA cell, that would give a working intermittent load of 500 mW per cell, or 1.5 W for a 3AA set. (2.4 V/0.45 A is the typical rating for a standard bulb in a 2AA flashlight.)

So a 3 W flashlight is too much to expect, but a small radio should work fine.

Could it be perhaps that your bargain cells were so cheap because they have been sitting on the shelf for too long?

 

[VidPro]

Yup ^ what he said, doesnt sound like you got your dimes worth.
i can put a "super heavy duty" into a old fenix L1T thing (single cell) and it works just fine. just not for long times

 

[Avatar28]

To put it in perspective how poor they are, someone posted a battery runtime comparison under different loads. In the AAA cells (which are admittedly not exactly powerhouses anyways), with a 1 amp load, an alkaline gave several minutes and I believe a NiMH cell gave a bit under an hour. The super heavy duty cell lasted for 6 SECONDS! Ouch!

 

[Illum]

To put it in perspective how poor they are, someone posted a battery runtime comparison under different loads. In the AAA cells (which are admittedly not exactly powerhouses anyways), with a 1 amp load, an alkaline gave several minutes and I believe a NiMH cell gave a bit under an hour. The super heavy duty cell lasted for 6 SECONDS! Ouch!

sometimes our standards are set too high for what the cell was originally designed for

the root of alkaline cells was to output considerable current over a short duration, while carbon zincs are designed to output relatively low currents over long periods of time...hence they are often used in stuff like low powered flashlights/clocks/radios, etc.

we say carbon zinc cells suck...but our applications such as flashlights that uses constant current regulators.....its like asking a mule to pull a cart made for several mules

 

[etc]

Price-wise, I got a big batch for the price that would have bought me several 36-cell packs of alkalines at Home Depot...

Yeah, they are about 2 years out of date. The voltage measures fine at 1.55V.

The not-so-mini maglite 3AA seems to be almost as bright as on other cells. I haven't checked the run time yet. But, they are mostly junk, I see that.

 

[Mr Happy]

In the old days, vacuum tube radios were often powered by (large) zinc carbon batteries. There would be one low voltage battery to heat the filaments in the tubes, and another high voltage battery to run the radio circuits. These batteries typically would be expected to provide weeks, if not months, of use before needing replacement. I remember as a child looking in wonder at 90 V batteries still for sale in the local radio shop and wondering what they were used for.

When I was growing up the transistor had firmly taken hold, but alkaline batteries were still seen as ridiculously expensive luxuries and nobody bought them. Zinc-carbon batteries were the norm, and they came in "regular", "heavy-duty" and "super-heavy-duty" varieties. The "regular" cells had their zinc shell exposed to the outside with a simple cardboard label wrapped round it.

Ahhh...nostalgia.

 

[TigerhawkT3]

I seem to recall that CZn cells contain carbon rods that can be used in carbon-arc lights. :devil:

Alternatively, they'd probably work well for something like DDing a single 5mm off a pair of them. That draws around 5-10mA.

 

[etc]

I am running a test with Garmin GPS that takes 2AA cells, and having them installed about 3 hours ago, it's already half-way discharged according to the device!! I cannot remember what the drain is, but it's something fairly low, like 80 mAh...

I know I can get 17-24 or even more hours (depending on how often the backlight is used) out of the device on regular alkalines and more like 2 days out of Lithiums..

 

[Fallingwater]

I got a lot of these Carbon-Zinc cells made by Eveready, called "Super heavy duty".

Hope you didn't pay much for them

Any luck with them? What lights like them?

It's not the lights, it's the cells that really hate being used in lights.

The CZ chemistry is good because it's very, very cheap, but it's bad because it can't handle high drains and has considerably lower energy density than alkaline.

The only flashlights that could probably use them and not torture them to death are the old direct-driven 1- or 2-5mmLED lights that were all one could buy before the advent of high-output LEDs and converters.

They're a good choice for low-drain stuff, though. I never buy any, but I regularly get them in stuff I buy from DealExtreme. I almost always swap in alkalines, and use the carbon-zincs in clocks and the like.

Do they leak more often than Alkalines?

Carbon-zinc cells eat their casing as part of their chemistry. They're 100% certain to leak, given enough time. They'll be too discharged to be of any use long before that, though. Or at least that's the theory...

 

[etc]

$0.05 each. About 1/5 of the price of Alkaline cells.

Hope you didn't pay much for them

...

 

[Mr Happy]

For amusement's sake, I looked up the service life data for lantern batteries made by a certain well-known, energetic battery company, and plotted equivalent data for zinc-carbon and alkaline batteries on the same axes:

Depending what cut-off voltage you choose, I guess it's true -- alkaline batteries do last up to 10 times longer!

 

[etc]

Thanks for the interesting graph.

It appears that these are at the bottom of the list, when *nothing* else is available.

I will run my own tests, see how long it will take to discharge a set in mini Mag 3AA 3W...

 

[Avatar28]

sometimes our standards are set too high for what the cell was originally designed for

the root of alkaline cells was to output considerable current over a short duration, while carbon zincs are designed to output relatively low currents over long periods of time...hence they are often used in stuff like low powered flashlights/clocks/radios, etc.

we say carbon zinc cells suck...but our applications such as flashlights that uses constant current regulators.....its like asking a mule to pull a cart made for several mules

I realize they weren't designed for high current applications anyways. And 1 amp is asking a lot of ANY AAA battery. I just was shocked that it could be discharged pretty much flat in 6 seconds. I wonder, though, how much it would have rebounded after that. I.e. how much of it's capacity was actually used up vs how much of it was just the battery sagging under the load.