On Monday, March 31, 2014 9:19:19 PM UTC-7, H oM eG uy wrote:

How many times can an ordinary alkaline battery be recharged?

Would you believe hundreds of times? The trick is to stop using
the battery well before it has given up all of its available
stored energy. Note that this is directly opposite to the
instructions that were packed with your battery-operated drill
or screwdriver with its NiCad batteries.

All the background information was absorbed and a totally re-
engineered product emerged, the Battery Xtender ™ Tests have
shown that it does live up to expectations, and that the claims
of ten times life extension for ordinary alkaline batteries are
not exaggerated.

See also:

http://www.tested.com/tech/1992-can-...ine-batteries/

BS, and don't trust Tested.com.

Even NiMHs and NiCads sometimes can't be recharged hundreds of
times, and the manufacturers of rechargeable alkalines have
claimed only about 10-30 recharges. In the 1970s Mallory (now
known as Duracell) made rechargeable alkalines, and either
Duracell or Energizer tried to sell them in the 1990s, but both
times those alkalines just didn't work well, even when users
did as you said and recharged them when they were still near
full capacity.

Wireless World once featured a charger for regular alkalines.
It would repeatedly charge for a few milliseconds and then
load down the cell for a few milliseconds to check its state of
charge, and a full charge for a D cell took something like 30
hours. This was an old design, not based on any microcontroller.
The article mentioned the importance of not overcharging and
showed a chart relating state of charge to internal pressure.
Cells could reach 70 PSI when overcharged.

Tested.com once tried the Wet Circuits power strip, claimed to
be safe even for use in very wet conditions:

http://www.tested.com/tech/5487-test...s-power-strip/

Why didn't those people get shocked? Because the 120VAC came from
a grounded circuit, and even if had been connected to only a 2-wire
circuit, it's likely any electrical leakage would have been
conducted by the neutral wire, instead of through any humans. But
there's always the possibility of loss of neutral, which creates
a very dangerous condition for ungrounded circuits. Also the
Wet Circuits power strip was falsely claimed to be UL approved for
safety, but UL said otherwise:

http://www.ul.com/global/eng/pages/n...1205080000.xml

So why should you trust Tested.com about an alkaline recharger
when it couldn't even catch something as simple as an obviously
dangerous power strip?