Quoted & secured.
And some people wonder why Wayne thinks we're a bunch of dicks. That really was unnecessary. If you genuinely thought that there was some possibility that Wayne would come back and 'tamper' with his post by editing it, then you could have found a way of quoting all of it for security without making such a confrontational remark.
Yep. Totally unnecessary.
Wayne,
Thanks for writing.
The thing you're missing is that the anger you're seeing is because Batteroo are a bunch of lying fraudsters. This thing is 100% a scam. Snake oil of the very highest purity. They're taking people's money under false pretenses and that makes people angry.
Secondly, Bob has been making claims about shipping for a year and a half so when ONE box of batterisers turns up at somebody's house it's natural that the spotlight turns on them.
That one person, the guy who received the very first (and only) box of Batterisers, was you. You won the Batteriser lottery.
So ... I'm going to say one thing and I hope you'll listen:
Please stand back a few yards and look at who Dave(the guy who runs EEVBLOG) is. He's a bloke who's freely made 1000+ educational videos for Youtube and because of them has becaome a highly respected member of the electronics community.
He's totally legit, he doesn't bullshit. He's your kind of guy.
Take a look at a few randomly chose videos of his and decide for yourself what sort of person he is.
The very, very best thing you could possibly do right now is post a couple of batterisers to Dave. EEVBLOG Dave.
Why would you do that? Because Batteroo are a bunch of lying conmen who are taking people's money under false pretenses, that's why.
Batteriser doesn't work! I can say that with the same certainty as saying "2+2 doesn't make 5".
But... Bob is busy taking people's money under false pretenses by claiming that "2+2=8".
Thanks for making it this far.
Now, to answer a few questions:
I’m sure all you experts are totally correct in the highly technical details of what you assume the product to be and you may well be 100% correct. I’m looking at it more from a practical viewpoint and whether there actually is some obvious benefit to the average consumer and whether it is a viable product. If for some reason there are dishonest intentions by the principles in this Company, it will come out very quickly and no doubt be dealt with by the applicable authorities.
First of all, Batteriser is just a DC boost converter. You can buy them on eBay for 20 cents. Batteroo haven't invented anything, they just made a very small one.
The "technical details" aren't assumed by us, they're known with 100% certainty.
We can measure the amount of power in a battery. We can put it in a device until the device stops working and measure the power left in the battery afterwards (usually a couple of percent). We don't need a batteriser in our hands for that, we can be 100% sure Batteriser isn't going to make batteries last longer.
The only question is "How bad is Batteriser, how much power loss is there in Batteriser's DC converter?" (miniaturization has a cost in efficiency). That's it.
• There are very few examples that I can think of where batteries are subjected to a single constant drain until they are completely exhausted (some exceptions would be things like wall clocks, led alarm clocks, etc. – even items like remotes, computer mice & keyboards are only draining power when used?)These generally last for long periods of time anyway so not really worth measuring?
Doesn't matter. The total number of available electrons in a battery is constant. You can't get more than that. If devices are pulling (eg.) 95% of the electrons out of a battery then nothing Batteroo or anybody else can do will get more than the remaining 5%. That's physics (and it works).
• There have been a lot of references to “dead” batteries – when is a battery dead as opposed to being flat? Is there actually a point measurable when a battery is classified dead? To me, even a flat battery will have some energy left – whether it’s useable in a particular device is another story.
It's very hard to get every last electron out of a battery. They'll always recover a tiny bit if you leave them long enough. The confusion comes from measuring the voltage when there's no load applied to them - the reading you get will
always be false (see next question).
• Self recovery – in my experience, batteries placed under a constant or one off heavy load will recover some of their voltage and energy when the load ceases – how do you build this into your analysis (for example, even the batteries I used in the torch tests recovered and were able to run the torches again after about an hour – 2 of them were up to 1.38 volts after dropping down to less than 1 volt)
What you're seeing is called "Equivalent Series Resistance" ('ESR') by engineers.
Imagine there's a resistor connected to the output terminal of every battery ever made. That's ESR.
ESR increases as a battery is used up, that's why you see the voltage go down (inside the battery it's still 1.5V but you see less at the terminals).
The voltage you see at the terminals depends on the load being applied to the battery. That's why measuring battery voltage with no load is pointless. If you leave it long enough it'll go back to 1.5V. That doesn't mean there's magically more electrons available, it just means the chemicals have evened out a bit internally. As soon as you apply a load the voltage will drop rapidly back to where it was.
• Voltage cut offs versus current cut offs – if an electronic device has a particular voltage cut off when it stops working and there is still some usable energy in the batteries, is it possible to trick that device into restarting by artificially raising the voltage while the remaining energy / current remains the same?
Yes, but most devices are designed with as low a cutoff as possible. The number of devices where that line of thinking is worthwhile is very, very, very small.
• A few of my mates are engineers – mostly civil and construction – they can be fucken weirdos at times (by their own admission) – why is it that you electrical mob are able to take this to a whole new level?
I don't know exactly who contacted you but imagine there was 100,000 of your mates at a party and you attracted the very
worst of them ... it wouldn't be good, right?
That's probably the electrical engineers you just met.
• Here’s a thought or concept – there are so many people out there having a real go at developing disruptive new technology – some will succeed , some will fail dismally – why not use your collective knowledge and talent to engage with them and assist where you can or steer them in the right direction if they are on the wrong track – you will feel so much better than joining together to belittle and ridicule them because they don’t quite come up to your perceived standards of how things should be – just a thought?
There's really nothing for Batteroo to succeed at.