How to manage/identify/organize batteries?

In my days of innocence, battery management was easy. Buy alkaline AAs or AAAs, stick them in the light or device, and toss them when they stopped working. Rinse and repeat.

Now I am mostly using rechargeables (still AA and AAA so far) and I have a variety of batteries of different types, bought at different times. So I find I need a way to manage my batteries so I have an idea how old they are, how and where they are used, when they need to be tossed, etc.

For my 4XAA digicam it is fairly easy, I keep a set of 4 in the camera and a backup set of 4 in the camera case, so they get used and swapped in only one use and with no confusion (at least until a single cell in one of the sets starts going bad).

But what about managing the batteries that get used in my lights, as well as all the lights and other devices used by the rest of the family? How does everyone keep track of your batteries so you don't mix old and new ones, track how long ago they were charged if they are in a storage container, etc?

Thanks.

I just number each battery with a permanent marker, and keep a spreadsheet with things like what device each one is in, how many charges it's had, what the charger reported its capacity to be the last time a refresh&analyze cycle was done, etc. I should add dates in too, now that you've mentioned it...

I do the same as yowzer.

I number each cell within it's "category" (i.e. Eneloop AA are numbered 1 - 44, Eneloop AAA are numbered 1 - 12, etc.)

The problem with spreadsheets is while the information is easily located quickly, you're not able to to store much data in the first place.

Not to pick on Black Rose, but I'll just use that as an example since there's a screenshot posted right there. You get no history over time there. (What was the capacity test on May 1 compared to Jan 1?) You can't realistically just keep adding infinite columns for each test, and then your test date columns wouldn't line up with the other cells anyway. Unless you tested all 200 of your cells on the same date each time.

This is to say nothing of the 'narrative history' that is extremely helpful in looking back on what went wrong with a cell and what to do about it. This is where the text file approach comes in. Can take a lot longer to locate information at times, but at least you know _everything_ about that cell.

In my spare time I'm working on writing an application that merges the best of both worlds there. For what it's worth.

You said you had family though, and that's where everything goes out the window. I couldn't imagine trying to get a wife and kids to open a document and log all this stuff each time they swapped out batteries!

As for labeling the cells themselves, I use a Dymo LetraTag which works great for me. The paper stickers do add a little bit of width though so for extremely tight fitting devices that could be a problem.

core said:

As for labeling the cells themselves, I use a Dymo LetraTag which works great for me. The paper stickers do add a little bit of width though so for extremely tight fitting devices that could be a problem.

Click to expand...

I have already started labeling mine with Scotch tape and a Sharpie. The tape is thin enough to add minimal thickness though the Sharpie wears down over time and I have to refresh the writing.

This worked well when I had only 8 or 12 rechargeables (just labeled #1, #2, etc.), but now I have, ahem, a few more and it is hard to keep track of what my labels mean. I started adding letters (for example, the first Duraloops I got were labeled D1, D2, etc.) but that is getting a little unwieldy and not as organized as I would like.

You're probably right about the family's devices; the only saving grace is that when their batteries die they usually come to me...."Daaaaaad, do we have any batteries???"

IamMatt said:

but now I have, ahem, a few more and it is hard to keep track of what my labels mean. I started adding letters (for example, the first Duraloops I got were labeled D1, D2, etc.) but that is getting a little unwieldy and not as organized as I would like.

Click to expand...

The nice thing about a printed label is you can pack a lot more info into a small space. With a 2 digit scribbled number your only real source of info is back in the document. Which works out fine for a lot of people. But get lazy on the document updating and you lose your data.

Since in your OP you hinted at wanting to know age of the cell at a glance, here's my convoluted system.

The LetraTag allows 2-line labels which is real handy, so one of my cells might be labeled as such:

Z06FC7
Scanner 2

Which tells me it's an Energizer AA NiMH purchased 2010-06-15, retail package 'C' (I just increment this in case I buy tons on the same day), and 7th cell in the retail package. And I know this is matched evenly with the other 3 cells marked 'Scanner 2', of course to be used in my scanner at once. 9 times out of 10 I omit the second line though, since I shuffle cells around so much and most of my cells aren't earmarked for just one device. (I considered marking the measured capacity instead, but one would drive themselves nuts relabeling cells every month as they change.)

If I could get a barcode on there too I'd be in heaven!!! But printing up 8.5x11 avery sheets and sitting there with a scissors would _not_ be fun. Heheheh Hey, that might solve the family issue too, if all they had to do was scan it before use.

core said:

The problem with spreadsheets is while the information is easily located quickly, you're not able to to store much data in the first place.

Not to pick on Black Rose, but I'll just use that as an example since there's a screenshot posted right there. You get no history over time there.

Click to expand...

No worries; That is the biggest downfall of how I use the spreadsheet to store my information.

I only update the reported capacity when I do break-in or refresh/analyze cycles.

I want to add another pair of columns to the spreadsheet so that I can track break-in capacities versus refresh/analyze capacities, since R&A reports real world values versus the best case values from break-in.

Unfortunately in order to do that, I'd have to perform break-in cycles on 154 NiMh cells

I considered building an application to maintain the info, but since I spend all day writing software, I don't want to spend my evenings doing it as well.

Spreadsheets are quite versatile. If you want to keep more detailed information about individual cells, you could create a spreadsheet workbook with a page for each battery and a summary page with a list of the batteries.

The pages for each battery could be a log of each event that takes place with that particular battery. You could enter one line for each event starting with the date the type of event (charge, discharge, break-in, cycle) with all the information that you would like to include in each row.

The summary page could have a row for each cell with each type of event in the rows. Each field under a particular row, for a particular cell could look up the most current event, or add the number of times the cell has been charged, or calculate the next time you want to cycle the cell (based on parameters that could be listed on the summary page so that you could change them if you like.)

You could break down or process the logged information about each cell to the point of being completely ridiculous. Granted it may take a little work setting up the spreadsheet, but after it is set up you only need to enter the data in the individual cell sheets as you charge, discharge, cycle, etc. each cell.

I use a spreadsheet (Excel) also and it works just fine for me. As my battery collection and information grows, I just add more columns or rows.

As for marking batteries, I used to use sharpies but now I write the number on a post-it note, stick it to the battery and cover it with a small piece of clear tape. Like the spreadsheet, this works for me.

Russel said:

Spreadsheets are quite versatile. If you want to keep more detailed information about individual cells, you could create a spreadsheet workbook with a page for each battery and a summary page with a list of the batteries.

The pages for each battery could be a log of each event that takes place with that particular battery. You could enter one line for each event starting with the date the type of event (charge, discharge, break-in, cycle) with all the information that you would like to include in each row.

Click to expand...

That's the way I do

Russel said:

Spreadsheets are quite versatile. If you want to keep more detailed information about individual cells, you could create a spreadsheet workbook with a page for each battery and a summary page with a list of the batteries.

Click to expand...

I must say I had not considered using an entire sheet for each cell in that manner. That has some merits. In addition to the 4 event types (charge/discharge/etc) you listed you could also have an 'info' type where the real nitty gritty info goes. That time you left it in a baking hot car at the airport for a week. I suppose the code in your summary page would just ignore any event types that it didn't recognize.

I guess the reason I never considered this is... as an app developer, it just seems like one of those things that you "just don't do". After all, you would never have code that creates a database table for each entity, when those entities do not have a fixed upper limit.

Are you guys really using this approach with success with say 200-300 cells? How do you navigate to a specific sheet? (Scrolling through tabs at the bottom with the mouse is not an option, yowzers!) Also, does Excel choke and die with 200+ sheets or is it business as usual?

I use OpenOffice but would certainly consider paying for Excel. OpenOffice I believe has a limitation of 256 sheets, which means I'd have to break things out into separate files as I hit the limits. Worse yet, I couldn't find any way to navigate to a specific sheet. (You know maybe, Ctrl+G, then type "N06F64", hit Enter, and you're there.) They've got this 'Navigator' window, but again you're stuck scrolling and scrolling to find your sheet in the list.

Or is it as simple as writing a script for a keyboard shortcut handler, and then you could just write code to pop up a text entry window and do the navigation by code? I haven't written anything in Excel in about 13 years, not sure what modern versions let you do.