I have the power!

If, like us, you buy batteries for stuff and then forget, or you take batteries out of something and put them on a shelf, or you somehow end up with batteries from you’re not quite sure where, then you’ll eventually end up with a box / tub / draw full of batteries.  None of which you’re sure work.  When the remote control / guitar hero guitar / doorbell / smoke alarm then stops working and you put batteries in and it still doesn’t work you’re never sure if it’s the batteries or the device.  I mean, those batteries could have been standing there for months, or they could even be the ones you took out last time it stopped working.

I finally decided to buy a battery testing device so I could check the several million batteries we have lying around and see if any of them are any good.  As is normal these days, I spent about 11 minutes checking the reviews on Amazon and bought a device which got the least bad reviews.  It was pretty cheap so I wasn’t expecting anything built to last, but if it saves us a few quid buying new batteries then job done.  It has a little LCD display which indicates the charge left in the battery you’re testing and it tests like every single battery size known to man.

When it arrived, I was amazed to discover the device is the very definition of irony.  It takes a single AAA battery to operate it.  So, if you put a battery in to test, and the battery in the device is dead, you don’t know if the device is dead or your battery is dead.  And you can’t test the AAA battery, because, your battery test device isn’t working.  Ad infinitum.

Maybe I need a backup battery testing kit with an emergency known-working AAA battery to test the battery of my battery testing kit in the event that a large number of batteries I’m testing don’t work and I start getting nervous.

I guess they could have avoided this issue by including a ‘self test’ mode on the device, but they didn’t.  Still, it has proven that 1/4 of the batteries we had are virtually dead, another 1/4 are ‘okay’ and the others seem pretty good.