h a l f b a k e r y
"Not baked goods, Professor; baked bads!" -- The Tick
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This device will completely drain any battery that is placed in it. This is useful for getting the last bit of energy from otherwise useless cells. It can also drain rechargeable batteries so that they can retain their full capacity. (This is based on my having heard that rechargeables that are recharged
before they're drained do not charge fully).
The energy drained thus could be used to charge other batteries, or maybe feed right back into some household device.
Annotation:
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First, note that it takes vastly more power to charge a battery than the battery is able to give while discharging. It would take ten fully charged batteries to recharge a single discharged battery... so this isn't likely to save on power consumption very much. |
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Second, the so-called "memory effect" you are referring to (which requires you to discharge a rechargeable battery all the way before recharging) only applies to NiCad and other old-technology batteries. Newer LiIon and NiMH batteries suffer no such problems and are generally kept "topped off" by a trickle-charging system (just like your car battery). |
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Just put the little suckers in a kid's toy. Presto! Flat in about 30 seconds. Don't believe me? Have kids. |
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Centauri's idea is not 'kill batteries', they do that pretty well on their own. It was 'consolidate the remaining charge into one battery'... |
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while disposable batteries are used, their voltage is decreasing. we call them "dead" when they dont have enough voltage left for the device we want to you them in. but they still do have some voltage, just a fraction of a volt, but often a large fraction. |
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as long as you stack them in series, the fractions add up to 1.5v pretty quickly. as a kid i always stacked them to power my radio shack 150-in-1. years later i saw a hill tribe doing the same thing in a more memorable way: |
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i know a bunch of guerillas in the jungle in northern thailand. they live in the jungle and dont have much (fighting against the military dictatorship in burma). batteries are heavy and expensive. they take every last electron out of batteries before tossing them. i saw a long bamboo pole, the diameter of a D battery, filled with same, with the two leads powering a 9v radio. |
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An educational kids toy !]
that would behave in a tamagochi like manner, could take advantage of the situation.
The children would have to find batteries near death on a regular cycle to feed an electronic critter. Failing to feed it, or overfeeding it with an underused battery, would result in a display of, malcontent, malnutrition, sickness or death.
If properly used, the toys would become necklaces of series of batteries, and the LCD critters would dance and sing or display songs and messages about responsible energy use and eco-conservation.
The critters might be able to upload information so teachers could analyse the caregiving capabilities of their students
Hopefully the toy would encourage the kids to take more care of their of batteries and make them aware of the energy crisis. In the more likely event, it will encourage them to spend minutes spinning the wheels of their Teeco minisuper Bot in the air for the sole purpose of harvesting a fresh set of dead batteries to feed their ailing critter. |
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Any body guess how many wattHours of grid electricity I used to write this, in thousands of dead batteries? |
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Had this idea this morning, or similar. It would increase the longevity of your mobile phone's battery by draining it before recharging. How to drain the power? I'm thinking a computer solving unsolvable algorithms in its spare time. |
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