Charger for Standard Alkaline Batteries

This sounds dangerous to me. I wanted to get some opinions from the experts on here.

Alkaline Charger

Wow, they have sold 2500+. That sounds supper dangerous to me!

I had one before knowing better.

It works best on lightly-discharged cells, and caused more deeply-discharged examples to leak.

Best to invest in a few Eneloops/Duraloops and charger, IMO.

I've experimented alot with this and it generally will let me recharge them 1-2 times before they leak.

Dangerous is a relative term. Absolute worst case scenario is that an Alkaline cell might explode, but with alkies explosions aren’t really explosions as much as they are burst-open events. Sometimes loud, sometimes not. I’d say the chance of fire is pretty much non-existent.

Is it even possible to charge Alkaline batteries ? They are primary batteries and not rechargeable.

They aren’t designed to be rechargeable, but like scaru said, you can certainly top them up at least a couple of times.

That or just spend an extra $10 and get an eneloop four pack and charger and top them off 1500 times. Now worries and a lot better performance.

Sure, that would be my advice to, which I follow myself.

Growing up in the Philippines, my mom used to put spent eveready batteries out in the sun and she swore that they got recharged. So of course I grew up thinking it was true.

When I was a kid I used to love building small circuits, chargers, blinkers, alarms etc. chargers were basic constant current, timer based ones and I remember my playing with them on alkaline batteries too. Especially for low consumption devices like clocks and watches a quick touched button cell could work for weeks. I also remember there were some emergency lighting circuits published on hobby magazines, using primary batteries but also trickle charging them to keep topped. Now that we are grown up we have the money to buy more rechargeables. But after your thread I guess I can still touch up my rare film camera batteries.

Hmm, interesting concept, I wouldnt mind buying such charger for 10$ shipped to Europe, not more, just to play with it :D!

However, looking for similar charger on Ebay I stumbled upon this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/AC05059-0001-IGO-Rechargeable-Alkaline-Batteries-AAA-4-pk-/360503852676

Alkaline rechargeable batteries?!
Anyone tried such type of batteries?

Yeah, I have a bunch of them. They are a different formula than normal aklalines so can be recharged. However they still aren’t as good as nimhs. They can’t supply high currents, they get around 100 cycles (less if fully discharged), and they require a special charger.

Yeah, just read wikipedia:
-hundreds of charges, Id rather say, top-up cycles if discharged for less than 25%
-few dozen charge/top-up cycles if discharged more than 50%
-if discharged empty, needs to be refreshed couple of times

And as mentioned by scaru - meant for really low drain devices.

So, not good for anything flashlight related :D!

and you’re dying to hear just one more classic Rolling Stone song outta of an MP3, yeah I can see where one of these might be worth $10 - or to give some life back to a sputtering shortwave radio in the middle of announcing another ICBM’s heading your way. :smiley:

It’s small enough to go into an extra not your main bug-out bag without too much bother. Maybe a half-way good barter item to trade something with peeps without any good rechargeables at all but have a crapload of alkies laying about.

They do at least top-out your existing alkies which is better than nuttin I suppose so I don’t think they’re necessarily completely idiotic in an end of the world common-sense sorta way. H)

If you can’t afford Alkalines, you can’t afford the charger.

This kind of reminds me of a charger that Radio Shack used to sell back in the 70s for ‘heavy duty’ zinc-carbon batteries. I always wondered how well THAT thing could have possibly worked.

Huh, so this sort of charger is still floating around out there. I remember I saw something like this years ago in the teaser items next to the cash register at a supermarket.

I just got it. And yes, it works. And it’s surprisingly well-made.

Funny how some folks jump to conclusions just because it sounds like it wouldn’t work, even when it does.

Now, is it NiMh/Li-ion charger effective? Of course not.

Does it raise the volts back up some on reasonably depleted alkalines? Yes, it does.

Could this be conceivably useful someday in a SHTF situation where ya might need 5 minutes or so of extra-power, talk-time, whatever? IMO, yes.

Is it therefore worth $10? You decide.

As for me my sentiments are that it’s better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. $10? C’mon.