Batteroo testing

[nctnico]

It seems the loss of the Batteroo is way more than what you'd expect based on efficiency alone.

Why do you say the losses are more than expected?  It seems just as expected to me.

- The inefficiency of the converter itself is going to waste a huge amount of power while doing the boosting.
- The power delivered to most loads is going to be at its highest for the whole time it runs because of the constant 1.5v supplied to it, using far more power than it normally would with plain cells.
- Each cell itself is going to be discharged at a much faster rate because of these factors, leading to significantly reduced total cell life.

These points have merit but without data to back them up they are just speculation. It needs some serious testing to see what the exact cause of the poor efficiency is so it can be determined what kind of loads would benefit from the Batteroo sleeve and which don't.

[Smokey]

The sleeve might be beneficial on something like a travel electric shaver (Remington 2xAA) for instance, where performance is more important than longevity.
...

You may say that now until you have your trimmer die half way through, leaving you with a half trimmed face... I'm going to have to say I'd rather have the warning sign of the motor slowing down.

[djacobow]

Better a half trimmed face than a half cut whisker with an electric shaver attached to it.

The sleeve might be beneficial on something like a travel electric shaver (Remington 2xAA) for instance, where performance is more important than longevity.
...

You may say that now until you have your trimmer die half way through, leaving you with a half trimmed face... I'm going to have to say I'd rather have the warning sign of the motor slowing down.

[Brumby]

A couple of spare batteries would fix that.

[drussell]

These points have merit but without data to back them up they are just speculation.

Fair enough... 

I await the full, proper, performance characteristic information which Batteroo promised about a year ago.... 

The fact that we are having to do their testing for them, well...

It needs some serious testing to see what the exact cause of the poor efficiency is so it can be determined what kind of loads would benefit from the Batteroo sleeve and which don't.

I'm not sure why you can't fathom how the overall efficiency would, on average, be so terribly horrible... and I honestly don't believe you're a Batteroo apologist shill or anything, however...

The first person to demonstrably, verifiably, show any product actually benefiting from a Batteroo Sleeve receives my gratitude in the form of $10 CAD sent to them via PayPal to offset the beer consumption that must have accompanied such an arduous adventure as finding the one in a zillion niche product where it actually makes sense to use one of these humorously deceptively marketed quackery-sleeves ...

[SeanB]

The first person to demonstrably, verifiably, show any product actually benefiting from a Batteroo Sleeve receives my gratitude in the form of $10 CAD sent to them via PayPal to offset the beer consumption that must have accompanied such an arduous adventure as finding the one in a zillion niche product where it actually makes sense to use one of these humorously deceptively marketed quackery-sleeves ...

I cannot show you it, but I guess Bob's wallet has benefited from the use of these, to some extent.

Mine, however, is in a sad state. If you wish to make the $10CAD donation, send it to Dave instead. Tell him to have a beer

[DrGeoff]

Does this Batteriser continue to use power to regulate the output voltage when the device is switched off?
If so, wouldn't this make is useless as it drains the battery continuously?

[digsys]

Does this Batteriser continue to use power to regulate the output voltage when the device is switched off?
If so, wouldn't this make is useless as it drains the battery continuously?

YES, It stays on under ALL conditions, it has NO smarts. The Quiescent current is app 14uA though, so not terrible. No good for devices that run for years

[Fungus]

Why do you say the losses are more than expected?  It seems just as expected to me.

- The inefficiency of the converter itself is going to waste a huge amount of power while doing the boosting.
- The power delivered to most loads is going to be at its highest for the whole time it runs because of the constant 1.5v supplied to it, using far more power than it normally would with plain cells.
- Each cell itself is going to be discharged at a much faster rate because of these factors, leading to significantly reduced total cell life.

These points have merit but without data to back them up they are just speculation.

Informed speculation, based on the laws of physics. It's not going to be the Easter Bunny stealing the electrons.

[Fungus]

You may say that now until you have your trimmer die half way through, leaving you with a half trimmed face... I'm going to have to say I'd rather have the warning sign of the motor slowing down.

That happened to me once. It's not just that you'll look silly afterwards, the hairs actually get trapped in the screen and you have to rip it off your face. Ouch!

[BrianHG]

The first person to demonstrably, verifiably, show any product actually benefiting from a Batteroo Sleeve receives my gratitude in the form of $10 CAD sent to them via PayPal to offset the beer consumption that must have accompanied such an arduous adventure as finding the one in a zillion niche product where it actually makes sense to use one of these humorously deceptively marketed quackery-sleeves ...

How about if I create a battery powered hand warmer to place inside my gloves, battery included...
All losses introduced by the batteriser are given off as heat, and since I'm powering a resistor with mechanical thermal switch as the heating element to generate the heat, there should be a net 0 loss.  The batteriser basically adds the regulated switching supply my resistor heater circuit is missing improving the design.  This means with my resistor heater element tuned to warm my hands down to  -20 deg.C.  As the battery drains, it will only partially warm my hands without the batteriser.  (Yes, I know the hand warmer will drop dead at 1 point with the batteriser, but, all known inefficiencies due to the voltage step up converter is given off as useful heat to my hand since the battery is in my gloves as well...)

Have I earned your 10$?

[ElektroQuark]

Has anyone measured the resistance of the sleeve? It's now part of the "virtual" internal resistance of the battery.

[Caca]

Good point, I bet the batterizer designers never considered radio interference.  I wonder if it has FCC approvals... 

Yes, a FFC test was done, with a 1 kOhm resistor:

https://www.batteroo.com/downloads/Batteroo_Report_FCC.pdf

I've done a test with a 1 kOhm resistor as well, but only for the output voltage, and ripple was 200 mV:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/batteroo-testing/msg1096136/#msg1096136

So EMI might be no problem, but the high ripple, which EcProjects noticed, too in his videos.

This test is nice and all but if I read it correctly it's only radiated emissions and since all the conections in batteriser are really short it wouldn't radiate much, measuring the conducted interference might be much more interesting.

[mikerj]

It seems the loss of the Batteroo is way more than what you'd expect based on efficiency alone.

Why do you say the losses are more than expected?  It seems just as expected to me.

- The inefficiency of the converter itself is going to waste a huge amount of power while doing the boosting.
- The power delivered to most loads is going to be at its highest for the whole time it runs because of the constant 1.5v supplied to it, using far more power than it normally would with plain cells.
- Each cell itself is going to be discharged at a much faster rate because of these factors, leading to significantly reduced total cell life.

These points have merit but without data to back them up they are just speculation. It needs some serious testing to see what the exact cause of the poor efficiency is so it can be determined what kind of loads would benefit from the Batteroo sleeve and which don't.

These points are not speculation, they are facts based on basic physics.  I suspect what you are trying to say is that each effect should be quantified, which is a different thing entirely.

[nctnico]

These points have merit but without data to back them up they are just speculation.

Fair enough... 

I await the full, proper, performance characteristic information which Batteroo promised about a year ago.... 

The fact that we are having to do their testing for them, well...

That is what is holding me back from pulling out the network analyser to measure various batteries and getting some Batteroos to test with. I'd like to have some justification for spending my time.

It needs some serious testing to see what the exact cause of the poor efficiency is so it can be determined what kind of loads would benefit from the Batteroo sleeve and which don't.

I'm not sure why you can't fathom how the overall efficiency would, on average, be so terribly horrible...

Dave's toy train test is pretty devastating ( https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-963-batteriser-batteroo-passive-toy-test/ ). He gets about 31% less in travelled distance (=number of laps) from the toy train which has the Batteroo. That is a massive difference and I'm curious to figure out where the energy went. Maybe that knowledge comes in handy one day when designing a battery powered product.

[HighVoltage]

That is a massive difference and I'm curious to figure out where the energy went. Maybe that knowledge comes in handy one day when designing a battery powered product.

Most likely the higher current pull from the battery is responsible for that.
As soon as the Batteroo starts regulating to try to keep the voltage at 1.5V, it will pull a constantly higher current.
But it is a surprise to me as well, of how bad the Batteroo performs in the real world.
As shown in one of the videos, it is not even capable of keeping the 1.5V constant.
 

[Hensingler]

That is a massive difference and I'm curious to figure out where the energy went. Maybe that knowledge comes in handy one day when designing a battery powered product.

The train has speed regulation. Without batteriser it's speed does not drop nearly as much as we know the battery voltage must have. The extra average 20% voltage from the batteriser is wasted, the batteriser losses are wasted and increased battery load from wastes decreases it's capacity. A triple whammy of fail producing results I don't find surprising.

If the batteriser had a buck switcher outputting maybe 1v it might well increase the number of laps this train could do on a battery.

[JiggyNinja]

The first person to demonstrably, verifiably, show any product actually benefiting from a Batteroo Sleeve receives my gratitude in the form of $10 CAD sent to them via PayPal to offset the beer consumption that must have accompanied such an arduous adventure as finding the one in a zillion niche product where it actually makes sense to use one of these humorously deceptively marketed quackery-sleeves ...

How about if I create a battery powered hand warmer to place inside my gloves, battery included...
All losses introduced by the batteriser are given off as heat, and since I'm powering a resistor with mechanical thermal switch as the heating element to generate the heat, there should be a net 0 loss.  The batteriser basically adds the regulated switching supply my resistor heater circuit is missing improving the design.  This means with my resistor heater element tuned to warm my hands down to  -20 deg.C.  As the battery drains, it will only partially warm my hands without the batteriser.  (Yes, I know the hand warmer will drop dead at 1 point with the batteriser, but, all known inefficiencies due to the voltage step up converter is given off as useful heat to my hand since the battery is in my gloves as well...)

Have I earned your 10$?

If you're designing your own product, you design your own power supply instead of relying on whatever garbage Batteroo used in their circuit. That way the power regulation is specifically tuned for your load instead of dealing with whatever Batteroo thinks is good enough for a generic, unspecified load.

TL;DR for the rest: It's clear that Batteroo has been a scam from the very beginning. What's next?

It is an awful state of affairs that the various real engineers here and elsewhere have had to put 1,000x more effort into DEBUNKING this useless piece of shit than Batteroo ever put into justifying their claims. Their banner spec was not more consistent performance or a minor boost to battery life, it was 8X LONGER!!!!, and their derivation (if it can be called that) of that figure was not "grossly oversimplified", it was fraudulently ignorant. And on top of that, their numbers weren't even consistent! They were saying 8x longer in some spots, and "80% unused energy" in another, which is 1/5th used. Those two numbers don't match. The defenders only offer strawmen, double standards, and moving goalposts in response to thorough criticism.

In a just world, just FrankBuss's results were infinitely more thorough and honest than anything they ever showed. In a just world, we would only have to throw those results back in their face and say "Your move". Unfortunately, we do not live in a just world.

There is quite literally no excuse for their behavior during their entire campaign. An honest campaign would have shown a proof-of-concept using normal-size components getting their 8X LONGER!!!! banner spec, then said "we want money to work on miniaturizing this". After all, if they can't get the performance they need out of existing modern components, there's no way in hell their weird, esoteric production process for making smaller components could beat ones that aren't restrained by size.

They didn't do that. They had nothing solid, and all their explanations at the beginning were voodoo engineering instead of anything legit. If they didn't know it was a heap of shit they were selling at the beginning, they would have found out very quickly when they tried to actually implemented it. The results from Dave and others are so unambiguous that there can be no dispute that Batteroo know that it's a dud. Given their vagueness from the beginning, I'm 95% sure it was never anything more than a con  anyway.

The question then should probably turn to legal remedies. They are making money off of fraud. IANAL, but the US does have lemon laws that might form the basis of a backlash against this, and I'm sure other countries will have similar consumer protection laws. They've probably never been used against a crowdfunding campaign, but everything's got to start somewhere. If this was a high-profile enough campaign it might be a good test case. That might depend on whether crowdfunding backers are considered "consumers" or "investors" though. I believe there are less protections for investors, which would provide way too huge of a loophole for these slimy bastards to ooze through.

[nctnico]

That is a massive difference and I'm curious to figure out where the energy went. Maybe that knowledge comes in handy one day when designing a battery powered product.

The train has speed regulation.

I doubt that because it would increase the price without any purpose. I just checked the video again and the train runs faster with the Batteroo so if the train has any kind of speed regulation it works poorly.

[drussell]

I doubt that because it would increase the price without any purpose. I just checked the video again and the train runs faster with the Batteroo so if the train has any kind of speed regulation it works poorly.

It doesn't have electronic speed regulation, just the way the motor is made mechanically makes it want to operate towards a certain RPM range...

[samgab]

I doubt that because it would increase the price without any purpose. I just checked the video again and the train runs faster with the Batteroo so if the train has any kind of speed regulation it works poorly.

It doesn't have electronic speed regulation, just the way the motor is made mechanically makes it want to operate towards a certain RPM range...

It's also a function of the reduction gearbox, with the motor turning at high rpm and the train moving very slowly.
We saw inside the train, and as you guys are saying, there's no circuitry, it's just a cell, a motor, and a reduction gearbox (plus a tiny incandescent bulb).

[RandomTask]

The question then should probably turn to legal remedies. They are making money off of fraud. IANAL, but the US does have lemon laws that might form the basis of a backlash against this, and I'm sure other countries will have similar consumer protection laws. They've probably never been used against a crowdfunding campaign, but everything's got to start somewhere. If this was a high-profile enough campaign it might be a good test case. That might depend on whether crowdfunding backers are considered "consumers" or "investors" though. I believe there are less protections for investors, which would provide way too huge of a loophole for these slimy bastards to ooze through.

At most, a US court would require them to revise their claim "language" and force them to refund $$ to anyone who filed a complaint claiming they were misled.

[obrien]

...
It's also a function of the reduction gearbox, with the motor turning at high rpm and the train moving very slowly.
...

I would bet the motor is designed to be optimal somewhere around 1.3-1.0V as it is the most typical range for battery. So when we feed it 1.5 constantly it does go faster but it's way less efficient, which result in very fast discharge. I do not believe the loses in batteroo itself can explain such a drastically poor performance.

[dr_frost_dk]

...
It's also a function of the reduction gearbox, with the motor turning at high rpm and the train moving very slowly.
...

I would bet the motor is designed to be optimal somewhere around 1.3-1.0V as it is the most typical range for battery. So when we feed it 1.5 constantly it does go faster but it's way less efficient, which result in very fast discharge. I do not believe the loses in batteroo itself can explain such a drastically poor performance.

The flashlight test got about the same result in runtime

[JiggyNinja]

I do not believe the loses in batteroo itself can explain such a drastically poor performance.

Why can't they? Their claims have been such transparent bullshit from the beginning I can easily believe that they did no significant engineering for this, and just slapped together some assortment of components with OK-ish values so that it kind-of "works", even though it doesn't provide good performance. If the inductor's resistance is high, the ferrite is lossy, and the switch has high saturation voltage, I can easily see this thing getting 60-70% or worse at higher current draws. FrankBuss's graph a few pages back only goes up to 120 mA and seems to have respectable efficiency, but that's going to get worse as the current goes up.

Combine that with the fact that a higher voltage usually has a naturally higher current draw on most loads, added to the increased current draw to feed the booster as the battery voltage drops, it's easy to see how the battery craps out so much sooner with it than without.