In article ,
"Jake" writes:
I saw an advert for a battery charger that claims to charge ordinary
batteries - primary cells. The specific ones shown in the ad were Duracells.
Are these chargers any good, or are they a waste of money? These batteries
say that they cannot be recharged. If this is true, how many times can it be
done?

As a child, when non-rechargable batteries were all zinc-carbon,
I discovered you could get a bit more use out of them if you
warmed them up in the oven.

About 25 years ago, I designed something which used one the Maplin
LCD temperature modules with high point and low point alarm outputs.
Life of the Zinc-carbon AA cell in these was a year, so what I did was
supply a charging current of about 20% more than the unit consumed.
It still has that same 25 year old zinc carbon battery in it, and
it still works - actually it's been running off it with no mains
power for almost a year now, as the item item was disconnected and
stuck in the garage.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]