Great AA Alkaline Battery Test (2016)

I came across this recent youtube comment[1] on why older batteries didn't leak. I don't know if it's correct but sharing it anyway:

>ceptimus 2 weeks ago (edited) >> Old alkaline batteries contained mercury, which made them resistant to leaking. The mercury was there to absorb the hydrogen gas, which builds internal pressure when the battery is used, causing them to leak. Newer alkaline batteries don't have mercury, because it's harmful to the environment when disposed. Unfortunately, the mercury free batteries leak much sooner - many of them long before their 'use by' date, even if you've never used them. Now you've replaced the batteries, you should check the camera more frequently. The modern rechargeable Ni-mh batteries, with a low self-discharge rate, are a good alternative: less likely to leak; but they're only nominally 1.2 Volts per cell instead of 1.5 volts, so some equipment won't work with them.

EDIT... maybe there's more to it than just mercury because some low-effort googling[2] found that law prohibiting it in batteries was 1996 (~25 years ago). That doesn't match the timeline in the video because Alec says his old batteries (that didn't leak) were "use-by-date-2016". So maybe something else was different about the formulation in his Kirkland Signature batteries circa ~2008.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5s6xerRqVY&lc=UgztQzUKV5BJQ...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=mercury+removed+from+alkalin...

Duracell (the Mallory company) was bought by Dart in 1978, then by KKR in 1988, Gillette in 1996, Procter & Gamble bought Gillette in 2005, and Duracell was spun off and bought by Berkshire Hathaway in 2016. (source: Wikipedia)

The company has been under large-scale finance / conglomerate management for more than 4 decades by now. I don’t think there would have been any immediate change in battery quality circa 2016. Seems just as likely that corner cutting (assuming there is corner cutting; I have no insight) started before changes of ownership.

That possibly explains the mysterious leaking battery problems. I remember that was an issue over twenty five years ago, which taught us not to leave batteries in devices. But then we accepted that they don't leak anymore. Then in the last five years or so, I keep finding gadgets that are destroyed, or almost so, from massive battery leaks. And alkalines don't seem to last very long, even though they are more expensive than they were.

In a past life I worked in the entertainment biz. Duracell ProCells were the go-to battery for important things. Britney Spears' headset would have had a Procell in it. They would all get tested before use and maybe 5 in a thousand were bad and not used. They weren't the absolute best in the world but they were acceptable and cheap enough to use and toss. After a show we would all take the 'used' batteries home and use them until they were actually flat. The only time I ever saw one leak in a device was if it got submerged or very hot. Now, the procell in my pencil-sized flashlight seems to leak after a month. I switched to energizer and, at least in my sample size of one, I haven't seen a leak.

Happened for me too. They were very reliable batteries, now even new batteries leak if unused for a few years. They have ruined several remotes that I use sparingly, they should change their name to Ephemeralcell.

Same here, lots of leaks-- some family even has had a drawer full of unexpired Duracells leak. Myself, I've switched over completely to NiMh except when unsupported by the device to remove the change of leaks (Nest x Yale door lock in particular, which detected NiMh as low battery even when 90% of the cell capacity is remaining). AmazonBasics has been bad with leaks too.

Edit: I have a Powerex MH-C980 and that has significantly made using NiMh easier. Before with a bundled Panasonic charger I had to charge everything in pairs, 4 max. The Powerex I can charge 8 cells individually, turbo charge if I'm in a rush, and see how much energy actually was used if something seems to be eating through a lot of batteries.

It wasn't a hedge fund, it was Berkshire Hathaway.

Completely agree. Duracell batteries have been leaking consistently for me, I've stopped buying them and actively warn others. They have destroyed various remotes, torches and an expensive camera flash after only a few years.

I have a pack of AAA Duracells I just went to open the other day which were "use by 2025" that I purchased just a few weeks ago, and one of the batteries in the middle of the fresh unopened pack was already leaking with one end fully encrusted with corrosion.

Curious if you're having these leaks in Duracells you bought from a big box retail store, or shipped from Amazon.

Mmm, I recalled I had Duracell (bought in 2018, expire date 2025) leaked in the battery compartment and I don't use the device. I just assumed the device was on standby mode and been draining the battery for a while which caused the leaking.

That mean I have to be wary of Kirkland AA and AAA Batteries because they are made by Duracell. This is new for me and I'm surprised about Duracell, and I am not surprised about hedge fund/private equity. This is their MO.

They are expensive, but if you need a primary battery, the non-rechargeable lithium batteries are great.

My clock radio backup battery has probably been in there for >15 years.

Same. I pulled down my dad's old camera from the closet a few years ago and it probably hadn't been used since the 90s so the batteries were dead. Threw in some new Duracell batteries and played with it a bit before putting it away. Opened it a year or two later and the batteries had swelled and leaked everywhere. Had to use a pair of pliers to extract the swollen batteries from the battery compartment. Such a huge pain.

After using Duracell for years for applications where I had to use alkaline, I recently had a set die with major leaks early, basically ruining a nice LED flashlight.

Yup, I hate Duracell batteries with a passion, they leak like a wet sponge and destroy electronics. I have converted most of my batteries to NiMH, but for the few that cannot be rechargeables, I will go out of the way to buy anything but Duracells.

Happened to me. Duracell was my goto and now they leak. I don’t know who to trust anymore. Thankfully I’m not a big battery consumer.

Yep, have the same experience here. Even worse, I have devices which require batteries to be installed for memory retention, so I can't really remove all the alkalines to prevent leakage.

Anecdata, I recently had to replace batteries in several smoke alarms. 3 were Duracells and 2 were Rayovacs. All Duracells were from 2016/2017, i.e. assuming they were installed right away they lasted around 5 years. Rayovacs were from 2010 and 2011, despite both brands being rated for 5 years. It is possible that old Rayovacs were installed around same time as new Duracells and both lasted around same time, still makes for an interesting datapoint.

Yeah the second blog post in this series has some examples of leaking, unexpired batteries: https://goughlui.com/2016/12/19/great-aa-alkaline-battery-te...

More anecdata - I don't have anything to add regarding Duracell, but I've experienced the same thing you describe with Energizer.

Recently I've leaned toward ACDelco batteries, which aren't on the test list.

I've had exactly the same experience with Duracell - batteries leaking years before their expiration date (sometimes shortly after purchase). I never buy Duracell anymore.

90% of my Duracells from the past decade have leaked and ruined equipment, and all well before expiration date. Ive been now telling my family and friends to avoid at all cost

Same here. Have had many of them leak before the due by date :(

But I think their NIMH batteries are good. Project Farm reviewed them, they were near the top. Of course I'm looking for good ones that are cheaper..

Someone did a test and found the Costco Kirkland batteries were not only as good as Duracell, but cheaper and lasted longer.

> there was a hedge fund takeover, which IME rarely results in improvements to long-standing quality products

But think of the shareholder value that was created!

https://web.archive.org/web/20121120072539/https://www.newyo...

That works well until you have kids running around... You going to put rechargeable cells in that Elena of Avalor wand your 4 year old chases the dog with? And her talking unicorn? How about all the light sabers?

In my experience, most of those types of toys don't go through batteries fast enough to justify a NiMH - they'd be in there for years. Invariably one of the kids will wind up mixing NiMH/LiIon/Alkaline in a toy, then the rechargeable winds up in the recycling bin a year later.

Fast forward 3 years, and your "infinite" AAs are all gone, lost, or in near-permanent use somewhere you can never identify, and you've wasted all that money.

In a few years when the kids move out and, and the number of battery powered gizmos is down to a manageable number, I'll try it again - until then, Amazon Basics AAA/AA are my friend.

Replying to boost this. We love Eneloop and have probably 40-50 of them in the house at this point, between remote controls, gamepads, children's toys, fairy lights, bike lighting, tools, etc etc. They all get funneled through a La Crosse charger with a simple two-bin depleted/charged system.

We've been buying them for years and I think I've only ever disposed of one that was unwilling to take a charge.

I agree, rotating collection of charged cells is the way to go but:

- need to establish a system of keeping track what's charged

- train family to participate

- train family to stop buying alkaline (mainly because in the alkaline recycling process you'll lose a lot of your eneloops)

- grow immunity against complaints from family

Not to mention a LOT of items now come with non-removable (mostly rechargeable) Li-Ion or NIMH batteries. Even small toys which used to require external batteries now come with it.

So I still have a small stack of alkaline batteries from 2017 I haven't replaced or depleted. Hopefully that stack remains untouched for another few years as well.

Just want to signal-boost Markus Wandel's Ni-MH battery tester/matcher on Github: https://github.com/MarkusWandel/battery-tester

I'm (lackadaisically) building a version of it now, in order to get matched pairs and fours of the 40-plus eneloops that we have. And identify the bad ones, of course.

> A huge number of appliances seem to be designed for the 1.35V NiMH chemistry now.

Yes, this is my experience too. One of the problems with NiMH is that appliances have helpful low-battery indicators which might light up as soon as you put NiMH cells in them, even though the appliance might continue working for a long time yet. A prime example is the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, which was released in 2001. The thing is powered by switching regulators which work fine with the lower voltages of NiMH cells!

Newer appliances have solved these problems. For example, the Yamaha PSS-A50 (a fantastic, inexpensive portable keyboard) has an option to configure the low-battery indicator for alkaline or NiMH chemistry.

I've switched to rechargables for home electronics years ago. It makes me feel better doing my share of lessening environment impact caused by disposable cells.

One notable exception for which I am still buying alkaine batteries is the August Smart Lock. When using NiMH batteries it starts complaining about depleted battery in a week, while it still Ok and works for much longer. It was reported to them and they advised to us alkaine. This is very annoying because all they need to do is to fix the software which does the voltage check and generates annoying notifications to the users. Just a few lines of code (or maybe single constant) could have an immence environment impact.

I finally switched to Duracell’s rechargeable NiMH batteries last year and won’t be going back to alkaline. They work well even for things like flashlights that need low self-discharge, and I no longer feel like I’m creating waste every time I burn through a battery.

I also came across some rechargeable lithium batteries packaged in 1.5V AAA, AA, C, D form factors, but they appeared to be newer and I was unsure about long-term reliability.

I probably have around 100 NiMH AA batteries at home, around 30 AAA ones, most of them are Eneloops, around 20 are Energizers and around a dozen are some misc. brands. Most of them time they are good but still a couple of Eneloops died just around 5 years. Moderate leaks but did not cause any trouble. Seemed to be caused by the fact I left them in toys and let them run flat for fairly long time(not sure how long, but should be less than a year). In the same period, I threw away double the amount of other brands ones. Most of the rechargeable ones are still going strong. I do observe a few of them are pretty weak and most likely going to die in a couple of months. In general, the cost to use rechargeable ones are only 1/4 to 1/3 of alkaline ones.

The only things is that some of the appliances does not like NiHM batteries. I'm no saying NiMHs do not work at all but rather they stop working with around 75% charge left, which is quite annoying. I use alkalines with them if I observe such behaviors.

I design some electronics in my spare time. As a user, I strongly prefer to have a choice of using a rechargeable battery. It somehow does not feel right to throw out a toxic battery when I could have another type potentially hundreds of times over many years.

It helps that there is a proliferation of quite powerful, low voltage, low power chips.

Some of the devices I design have USB interface which gives another option of charging the battery while it is connected.

I am currently working on a fully programmable mechanical USB/Bluetooth keyboard. It will work off of two AA NiMh rechargeable batteries and I plan these to be recharged any time the keyboard is connected to the computer.

How do you find good cheap low-self-discarge NiMH cells? I couldn't find any research on them (like the post article but for NiMH) because of SEO spam, and Amazon reviews are (of course) worthless.

Heck, I'm afraid to even buy NiMH batteries because of counterfeits. I bought a few batches of Amazon Basics batteries a year ago and 3/8 are dead already, but even if I purchased something labeled "Eneloop" on there, how do I know it's Eneloop?

Most of my remotes are still using the batteries they shipped with. It's hard to make the case for replacing batteries when the originals last 15+ years (and counting).

I didn't know that, thanks for sharing! It seems to be a lot more civilised version of what I was doing for years - test by licking it... Can do it almost in one gesture: hold the battery between thumb and middle finger, lick index finger and touch it on one end of the battery, then lick the other. With some practice can get pretty good accuracy in 0.5-1.5V range. Bit barbaric though :)

I wonder what phenomenon is driving this. A spent battery weighs more?

> As a result, I buy batteries not based on electrical performance, but track record in not ruining the things I put them into.

So do I. I'm now using low self-discharge NiMH batteries (mostly Eneloops) in pretty much every device that uses batteries, and I've never had one leak. I also use smart chargers to check battery health when I recharge them. A bit more initial outlay, but much cheaper in the long run, as the batteries can be recharged 1000s of times, and they hold their charge for many months.

I have had success in removing the battery leakage from my toys. Baking soda + water on a q-tip works really well.

Yes, I too have switched to Energizer - zero problems to date (switched from Duracell some years ago).

I have some similar Li-ion AA batteries for my Blink cameras. They work very well since the Blinks hate ni-mh batteries. Interestingly, these behave oddly in my camera speedlite. They can't seem to charge the flash, and the LCD flickers while on. My best guess is the charging the flash capacitor pulls more juice than the lithium batteries can handle. Thankfully, ni-mh work great.

For your Ni-mh that stop working, if they won't charge you can sort of jump start them using a good battery and they'll charge again. Use some aluminum foil strips and touch the contacts between the batteries together for a few seconds. Positive to positive, negative to negative if I remember correctly.

The AAA versions of these are a godsend for my Bose noise cancelling headphones. I tried using NiMH batteries, but the headphones would cut out every time I shook my head or chewed something, because they didn't have a high enough voltage.

"By Chemistry" seems to be the keyword here. AFAIK Alkaline also have several chemistry differences, and batteries especially OEM would be matched to the use (low energy-long storage for remote). General purpose/OTS battery seem to optimize for power for ease-of-use. Avoid the scenario of "Oh this toy doesn't work with this battery brand so I'll avoid it". Have you tried specific long-use batteries? Non-alkaline or Alkaline branded as such?

I'd seen those in the past. Prices have come down. Am curious what are the benefits over NiMN.

I actually learned a lot from your reports when I geeked out on flashlights and battery formats that were new to me, the 27xxx size.

Thanks very much!

(It was sometime in the past 18 months, in which all time sequences have been shredded in a lockdown blur.)

Apple did this with iPhones, where the CPU throttles itself when the battery can’t keep up with the peak demand anymore. They got sued for it (mostly because they didn’t tell anyone and people bought new phones when the old ones started mysteriously slowing down).

Have you ever used an old flashlight in the 80s or 90s?

As AA charge fell, the light got dimmer and dimmer. Today, we have devices that do the exact _OPPOSITE_, pulling the last bits of electricity out of the cells through boost-converters or whatnot (boost converters existed back then, but weren't as efficient or cheap as today).

Consumers demanded consistent and reliable performance no matter if at full-battery charge or nearly empty. People preferred their devices to suddenly "shut off".

> It's been a really really long time since my EE classes - are transistors just unable to operate this way?)

Yeah, most CPUs nowadays have dynamic frequency adjustment to maximize battery life. Lower frequencies also mean transistors can operate at lower voltages, so by reducing the operating frequency, you can reduce the voltage and therefore power draw on your battery.

Some LED flashlights with multiple brightness modes will drop to low brightness mode when cell voltage falls below a certain point.

Rechargeable batteries (assuming NiMH and Ni-Cd) can still leak, but usually the leakage is less severe.

Batteries are so cheap these days that I consider them essentially single use, like a paper plate. I buy the 60 pack of Rayovac AAs at Home Depot and always have fresh batteries -- and I don't have to worry about a leaking issue.

Ikea no longer sells alkaline batteries :)

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/newsroom/corporate-news/ikea-to-r...

> the new Lithium rechargeable ones

Lithium isn't rechargable. (Lithium AA cells are very long-life but very expensive. One-time use. Lithium-ion are rechargable, but are 3.7 volts and completely violate the AA spec)

NiMH is the chemistry for rechargable AA / AAA cells, since its 1.35V and "close enough" to the old 1.5V standard alkaline.

> Older rechargeable AA and AAA batteries were terribly short lived and so mostly useless but I assume Lithium ones are much better?

"Older", circa 00s NiMH chemistries had more energy storage (!!!). The issue was that circa 00s cells had a "self-discharge" problem, meaning they ran out of energy in just a few months (like 1 to 3 months).

Panasonic solved the problem with "Low Self Discharge" cells, aka "Eneloop", which started to come out in the late 00s. This chemistry had much less capacity, but took over a year before the energy went bad.

Its still NiMH chemistry, but just tweaked to focus on the self-discharge problem rather than energy-storage numbers / benchmarks.

With Eneloop taking the market by storm (especially popular with XBox users, which used AA rechargables), other companies also came out with LSD chemistries. These days, almost everything you'll find is of the LSD-type.

I've not seen AA or AAA sized lithium rechargeable batteries but modern low-self-discharge NiMH AA and AAA cell batteries are quite good today. The Panasonic Eneloop brand are generally widely available and good value for money. The AA size Eneloops are generally around 2100mAh and the AAA size around 900mAh.

The only downside to modern NiMH batteries today seems to be finding a good and easy to use charger which will properly discharge and/or cycle the batteries without requiring a human to fiddle with it or understand charge rates and when to discharge the cell prior to charging.

Here's one: https://lygte-info.dk/review/batteries2012/CommonAAIndividua...

Note the small link near the top titled "Comparator" if you want to generate comparison graphs between different batteries.

1.5V Li-ion rechargeable AAs are 3.7V cells with DC-DC buck converters attached to reduce the voltage. The main reason to use them is poorly-designed[0] devices that don't play well with NiMH. There may be some standby power drain from the electronics, and these are less compatible with voltage-based battery status monitoring than NiMH (NiMH gives a false low reading; bucked Li-ion gives a constant false full reading).

Modern low-self-discharge NiMH has very good performance and shelf-life; the white Panasonic Eneloop is the gold standard in this category; the black ones have higher capacity, but wear out in fewer charge cycles.

[0] Even if designing for alkaline without NiMH support isn't a design flaw per se, a device that doesn't work at 1.2V leaves about half the energy stored in an alkaline unused.

I've been a bit puzzled by the 1.5 V lithium AA batteries I see on Amazon. They say they are a constant 1.5 V all the way from 100% charged to 0% charged.

With the battery presenting a constant voltage, wouldn't that make battery level displays useless? They rely on the voltage declining as the battery discharges. With a constant 1.5 V battery your device is going to say the battery is full right up until it suddenly stops.

I'd expect that to get very annoying.

Edit: I mean the 1.5 V lithium rechargeable AA batteries, like these: https://www.amazon.com/Deleepow-Rechargeable-Lithium-Batteri...

I am very happy with my Eneloops. I used Ansmanns before (and still use the Ansmann recharge device), but they died after like 20 cycles (note: those Ansmanns were models from before the low-self-discharge era).

The Eneloops are 3 years old and still work fine while being used every day (recharge about once per week).

Project Farm has a video with tests: https://youtu.be/-jXQNY6rve8

https://lygte-info.dk is a good site.

Amazon Basics low-self-discharge batteries are fine.

Eneloop if you want to avoid giving Amazon money and don't mind paying more for the brand.

I love how he made it clear where it was assembled in. Every time he said "Made in USA with Global Components!", I was like yea more like made in China and rebranded in USA.

Indeed, and one major change that's taken place in the last few years is that Energizers are now as leak-prone as Duracells. Likely true of other brands as well. The only way to win the alkaline battery game is not to play.