Why don’t we phase out disposable batteries?

Certainly these batteries have different electrical characteristics. In most cases, products can be designed to cope with both disposable and rechargeable batteries. What we need to phase out is manufacture of products that are poorly designed and can only be used disposable batteries.

Adapters are available to use AA cells in equipment designed for C and D cells. AA cells are better value than the larger sizes because they are so popular.

Whereas a disposable C or D cell will have a substantially greater capacity than an AA cell, that may not be the case with disposables. I’ve just checked the Energizer website and found that their D cells are rated at 2500 mAh compared with 2450 mAh for their highest capacity AA cells. If you can get hold of industrial grade D cells at a sensible price, they have a higher capacity than the types sold to the general public.

It is best to keep rechargeables in sets of the same capacity and make sure that they are all fully charged before use.

PS For ‘cells’ read ‘batteries’ if that makes more sense.

And your alternatives to batteries James ?
I am afraid “capacitor power ” doesn’t hold up in real life Electrical Engineering when compared to a rechargeable battery . Think about ESR of the capacitor + inductance +leakage + dielectric absorption also the numbers needed to reach a voltage equivalent of a cell-net phone battery supplying a continual steady voltage
Sunlight ?–in this country ?
Some of the exotic alternatives thought up could be very dangerous and unsafe or cost a fortune .the best bet is a type of battery that doesn’t pollute the planet nor use up exotic mineral resources,now if you are talking of power sources for spacecraft then you have to think of cost as well.

Duncan, I don’t know why you mentioned capacitors here. This convo is about primary and secondary batteries, to use some real Electrical Engineering terms for single use and rechargeable batteries.

Any kind of battery converts stored chemical energy to electrical energy – either unidirectionally or via a reversible process. In contrast capacitors store electrical energy. As you noted, capacitors cannot be efficiently used for the long term storage of electrical energy and, relative to chemical energy sources, they are also very bulky and heavy for any given quantity of stored energy. But if a very intermittent and very high power is needed, then capacitors can deliver much higher pulsed powers than batteries, so they are useful for applications like pulsed lasers (shouldn’t every home have at least one?) and photo flash guns.

Compressed air and flywheel storage are two more relatively good energy storage mediums that might sometimes be used to replace or reduce the number of batteries needed in a portable item – but I’m doubt that either of them has wide appeal for consumer products.

Derek –James above made it perfectly plain that he wanted rid of batteries , I was replying to him.

You do me a disservice by criticizing my bring up of a type of electrical storage that was well publicised at the time as a “replacement for batteries ” but it failed in down to earth practice .

Other convos bring up “innovations as regards fire proofing domestic appliances – flammable tower block coverage’s and a whole host of electrical appliances where the original question brought in dozens of variations in “cures ” , honestly I feel I have a right to tell a poster that other means are not really viable.
Look you can stick a non rechargeable battery into a Motherboard to hold programming aspects of the board but have you checked the actual current consumption /day ? When you are dealing with Cmos chips its minute .

Duncan the convo is not about getting rid of rechargeable batteries – it is really just about getting rid of disposables. So there’s not much need for the discussion of other energy storage technologies here.

A poster has just posted about Apple products being “over advertised” on Which ? in the convo on battery replacements , he mentions a comparison to-
Android & Windows is he going to get marked down for that ? –

Outcry- this convo is for battery replacements in apple products not Windows or Android ???
I think its being OTT to accuse me when I can post 100,s of posts not directly connected with the subject already posted by many posters including some here.

Duncan, my previous comment was only a comment. I wasn’t saying that you should not have started blinding us with science about capacitors, but, in a nutshell, your response didn’t look very useful to our purposes here. All you seemed to be saying was “sorry we’re stuck with batteries because capacitors are no good”. As the convo assumes that recharcheables are a good idea, I l didn’t think that was being challenged here.

I use rechargeable batteries where it makes sense. In many applications such as infrequently used remote controls, disposable batteries can last for years, so there would be no benefit in using rechargeables.

The Which? tests focus on capacity, but that is not really relevant when there is little drain. I have been using Kodak batteries for years. They don’t do well in the Which? tests because of their low capacity but I find they do well and rarely leak, unlike some more expensive brands.

Now that convinces me Wavechange .

I’ve had a “freeplay” wind up rechargeable radio/torch combination with integrated solar panel for about 10 years and it is still going strong. It lives in the greenhouse and rarely needs winding, the solar cell doing the work.