renu it battery renewer

[f22shift]

http://www.asseenontv.com/prod-pages/renu-it.html?gid=ELECTRONICS

my guess that it doesn't really work . isn't it dangerour to charge alkalines?

 

[Flashlight Aficionado]

I didn't have that one, but I did have an earlier version of it. It "works" but not even close to buying real rechargeables. The instructions said to top off every day. If you use the battery until, say, half empty, it would not work as well. My experience with the charger and charging alkalines, was the law of diminishing returns was a zero tolerance policy. Simply after each charge, there was a noticeable loss of mAh/time. I was lucky to get five charges. Mine had a spot to store batteries. I had several leaks on the resting batteries. Since I didn't want batteries to leak in my precious flashlights and other goodies, I tossed it.

I hope my non-scientific review helps.

 

[Mugrunty]

lol, this reminds me of when I used to charge alkalines with my professor at school. He started bringing in bags of old ones to charge. It was so funny. He's like "I take the state's electricity and put it in my pocket"

You CAN charge alkalines, but you have to at a very slow rate. Anything much over 1/10 C and the cells tend to leak. Plus, the cell voltage continues to rise almost forever...so you have to watch them to see if they get too much above 1.6 volts or so. But since they are not really designed for recharging and that alkaline is a crappy rechargable chemistry anyway, you only get a few cycles before the capacity drops. just like Flashlight Aficionado said. It really doesn't work that well.
But if you were Macgyver and needed a little power to save up in order to light an LED flashlight to distract someone before you knocked him out...it might work.

I also tried charging carbon-zinc batteries, but that doesn't work. That chemisty is not rechargable. Funny Funny Funny.

 

[lctorana]

I have an Australian-made ReZap Battery Doctor that charges alkalines.

It works - it really does.

However, there are four caveats:

1) It cannot bring a completely flat alkaline back to life. With shallow DoD and frequent charges it works well.

2) Not all brands of alkalines take a recharge - and there's no picking which cell will take a charge.

3) Recharged alkalines are only suited to medium-low drain applications, unlike the first time. Definitely no hotwire use!

4) Only 20 or so recharges are possible with a good cell.

It also recharges NiCad, NIMH and "RAM" cells (e.g. Grandcell), and internet research told me that an earlier model of the ReZap actually charged carbon-zinc cells, but they stopped this.

And, yes Virginia, you CAN recharge Carbon-Zinc cells. Flat-pile layer-built dry cells respond better to trickling than cylindrical cells, which is why 1950s AC/DC & 3-way valve radios often had a "reactivate" setting where the batteries could be "reactivated" (i.e trickle charged). With careful and judicious use of this feature, you could double the service life of your (very, very expensive) B battery.

 

[darkzero]

I used have a BuddyL charger that charged Alkalines. That was like ten years ago. It had a switch for nicads & alkalines. It did charge them but the peformance flat out sucked. As someone mentioned, they had to be topped off everytime or you wouldn't get much use out of them.