How did they manage to get only 2 hours?
By being blatant liars
Yeah, pretty much... They know what they're doing. They're playing "
confuse and confound" with the general public (who they know full well can't be expected to understand the details of the engineering that goes into something like this) to obfuscate the truth. That's why they haven't published a
single piece of actual test data. It would either have to be completely fudged data or some kind of misleading edge case, otherwise it's going to show exactly what we already knew from the outset.
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It's those pesky laws of physics getting in the way again...
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a) We know they stopped the test where the blue line jumps upwards on that graph (claiming the batteries are dead there when they aren't)
b) We can see they have a cheap current measuring device attached to it, burden voltage unknown.
Yes, precisely.
a) For one thing, it seems that they're saying when the GPS informs you that it's activating it's Alkaline power saver feature to give you maximum battery life that this is the "
product failing, shutting off". This is completely untrue.
b) Obviously, either the batteries were not new with full capacity (unlikely) or all the added resistance of their goofy and horrible test setup is sapping extra power
AND making the battery voltage seen at the GPS significantly lower than the actual battery terminal voltage. This goes back to the original video debacle with the monkey where they claim the test setup needs to be correct, etc. and then blatently do it incorrectly over and over, again and again in various hilarious ways.
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How did you measure the boosted battery voltage? I guess you had to measure both batteries individually or so as there was a boost converter in between them?
5ky is using a single boost converter around the pair of batteries. Contrary to what Batteroo claims (that we must use their super-duper-extra-funky Batterizer brand boost converter which has magic-like efficiency,) this actually gives Batterizer the benefit of the doubt with regard to converter efficiency as it is very likely that even if they have a more efficient single converter than 5ky has tested here, once you put two of them (or 4,6,8 of them) in series you're likely going to waste significantly more power total in those multiple converter stages even though each one is doing a smaller "boost" in voltage. (Each one still has to do the full current, though, of course...)
edit: I was incorrect. 5ky is using two converters, see post #2248 below. It is still likely that you would lose efficiency in the total system as you put more and more converters in series, though, I would expect, so I've not removed the preceding paragraph.
The point about using boost converter on exhausted batterie is an interesting thing to put to test now.
You would have to allow the non-converterised setup to recover equally long as the batteries that you "recycle" using a converter and see how long both will run.
This would be a valid best-case-scenario test and similar to someone going to the junk drawer and pulling out a couple of "dead" batteries (which Batterizer essentially claims will work tickety-boo). This eliminates the converter losses during the actual real life of the battery.
The problem is there is no significant energy actually left in the battery so using the GPS example, you're only going to get a few more minutes of runtime after letting the batteries "recover" whether you're using an extra boost converter or just the one already built into the GPS. It should generally be slightly shorter with an extra boost converter added due to the additional losses but will again depend on the cutout voltages of each converter and the actual
chemical capacity left in the cell. Recharging a standard alkaline (which will never get you anywhere close to full capacity again but
will reverse the chemical reaction and put
some power back into the cell) will net you far more total use time from the cell than any Batterizer ever could...
All graphs clearly show the batteries recover after the GPS as powered off.
The open circuit, unloaded terminal
voltage will recover somewhat but the battery itself is still essentially chemically depleted and only a small amount of extra energy will be able to be extracted due to the chemistry having a chance to settle and the maximum amount of anode and cathode exposed to electrolyte, etc. As has been explained and demonstrated repeatedly, the unloaded voltage doesn't really tell you anything about the capacity remaining in a battery of any chemistry type. (Well, I suppose if you measure 0.125 volts on a cell that should be more like 1.56v new, you can deduce that you're not looking at a battery with any significant capacity left.
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) As Dave showed and explained in his videos, just because it measures 1.5v doesn't mean it has any usable energy left at all.
In high-drain, long-term loads where there is actually significant physical heating of the cell this effect will be amplified because the cell will have a chance to cool, the resistance of elements will drop, etc. so you will be able to extract a bit more total energy compared to a low-drain device but it's still going to be a pretty small fraction of the total battery capacity.
800%, even 80%, my arse!
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