John Tserkezis wrote:

Where they come into their own, is abnormally low temperatures (near
freezing in the snow for instance), where their life is about 10x alkalines.

Another area they may be better in is shelf life. You can expect about 10+
years for lithiums, and about 5-7 for alkalines.

The only place I have seen them here was a fan forced gas mask which was
part of an emergency kit given out to civilians in case of a CBW attack.
There it makes sense as the kit was to remain sealed until needed.

Once used, the batteries where the least of your problems.

I would probably put them in my emergency radios, some of which have
been the victims of battery leakage, but it's cheaper and easier to
rotate the batteries or keep them in a plastic bag outside the radio.

So if you're only ever in relatively warm climates, chew your batteries in
less than a few years, and don't care your saving a few snots worth of mass,
then they're largely pointless.

That pretty much fits me. If it freezes at all, it's never for more than
a day at a time. In the summer it goes up to 100F for a handfull of days.
Abnormally hot is 90F.

Rechargeable alkalines have modified chemistry that tries to improve the
recharge life (which was less than a dozen times) at the cost of other
performance points. (along with a corresponding increase in price which makes
standard secondary rechargeable technologies look attractive).

Whatever happend to the recharagebale alkalines that Ray-O-Vac came
out with in the U.S. in the mid 1990's? I bought a bunch of them to
use in handheld radios but found that they never performed as well
when recharged as the first time around and eventually gave up.

I did speak to an engineer at the company and at the time they had
no reliable way of recharging a battery pack. The charger would only
work on single cells, so you had to use AA battery packs and disaassemble
them for each charge.

By 1996 when I moved here, I had pretty much stopped using them and since the
chargers were never available in 230 volts, left them.

Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838
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