Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

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

Ahem. I guess so. :-)

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.

They're used that way for emergency EPIRBs. Not Energizer AA sizes of
course, but specially made primary lithium based technology cells.

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.

I've had use for them. During our last snow trip, I packed with a few sets
of AA lithiums, and used my GPS while sinking knee-deep in soft snow during a
hike.

Incidentally, NiCDs or NiMHs are all but completely useless in these
environments. I wasn't entirely sure how much worse plain alkalines were
going to be, but I didn't take any chances anyway.

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.

Like I said in my last message, there are "conditions" attached to their
use. Alkaline chemistry is such that if you flatten it, you will NEVER get a
charge back into it. (Yes, I hear the howls of objections, but you're all
quite free to **** your money into whatever you think works).

You will get best use if you use a bit, charge a bit, use a bit, charge a
bit. They'll last the longest, and is the cheapest technique if you do it
that way.

If you treat them like NiCD/NiMHs you may as well send your money to me, at
least I'll get some good use out of it rather than keep floating a technology
that was never designed to be recharged alive.

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.

That's right. I'm biased, and perhaps a charge perfectionist, but you
really do need full and absolute control over an individual cell to charge it
correctly. I'd go so far to say that applies for ANY cell type (even though
NiCD/NiMHs are somewhat lenient in this respect).

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.

Way back when I first heard about it (about a decade after it was incepted)
chargers of this type did not exist commercially. All the battery labels went
out of their way to say NOT to recharge them as well.
I also knew that carbon battery technologies were not particularly receptive
to this type of charge. (didn't stop me trying though)

I had built my own. I had played with it for a while, but it never got past
the "play" stage. And this was around the era of NiCDs being outrageously
expensive and hard to get. That's how impressed I was. Not.

--
Linux Registered User # 302622
http://counter.li.org