Reusing old batteries

(I couldn’t think of a pun title)

A few years ago, I got myself a battery charger. I already have several chargers, for Nicads and ni-mh batteries. But this one claimed to recharge ordinary Alkaline batteries as well! You know, the ones that always have “do not recharge” printed on them.

Long story short – it does sort of work. If the battery is dead, it won’t recharge. If it’s only partially used, it will refresh it.

Some will leak after they’ve been recharged, Duracell’s seem to be the worst at this, I no longer attempt to recharge those.

I sometimes grab a handful of old batteries from the recycle points in supermarkets. I test them with a meter when I get home to select batteries that are likely to work in the charger.

And it’s this testing that revealed something that surprised me – people are throwing away batteries with lots of life left in them, occasionally it seems they’re entirely unused! These don’t even need putting in the charger!

As an experiment for this blog, I grabbed 4 AA batteries from the overflowing battery recycle bin.

Battery 1 gave a twitch on the meter dial then showed nothing. It’s dead.

Battery 2 seems to have about 1/3 rd capacity

Battery 3 is dead, nothing at all

Battery 4 shows as full in my meter, or it’s unused!

I put all 4 in the charger, and it started to charge 2 if them. It wouldn’t charge 1 & 3, which were the twitch battery and the entirely dead batteries. This is what id expect.

Red light means charging, no light means no charge. Light goes green when it’s done (about 3 hours)

So I’ve gained 2 free batteries, one of which was close to new. This backs up past experience, I’ll usually find one or two hat are as good as new, a good few that are only part used, and a few that are entirely dead.

What a waste! Throwing out perfectly good batteries! Get a battery meter and test your batteries! Even if you don’t go to the trouble of recharging like I’m doing, you can make sure you only recycle batteries that are actually dead.

Finally, I should note that you should never put alkaline or other non rechargable batteries in an ordinary charger. At best that’ll leak, they could Exide or catch fire!

Even this magic Alkaline charger is no longer available, so maybe it’s too risky or too many batteries leak afterwards. Ive certainly had mixed results, but it’s a fun way to save on waste and to get batteries for free for tinkering projects.

An old mystery box

I dug out my board game of Cluedo the other day, and we played a game, which was fun. I’ve had this since I was a child, and not played it since then.

Yes, the caption on this blog post is misleading, but it is old and it’s a box of a mystery game. Plus there was a fun unexpected surprise inside. Read on…

I always liked the game, partly because it always felt old. The style and artwork feels 1930s like, perhaps reflecting Agatha Christie, even though I wouldn’t have known that as a kid.

ugh

So it irks me seeing the modern board game design and box. It seems to lose all that character that I like. I must be getting old, I don’t like modern things.

I wondered how old my game was, and found some different dates scattered around.

The box states ©1965 and 1972. The box does look old and basic, the typeface and layout in particular.

The instructions say ©1975, suggesting they’re the newest part of the game, because…

…on the board is ©1949 ! Had the board not changed design between 1949 and 1975? Maybe not. I think this is why I liked it as a kid (and still do), it felt like you were wandering around an old house as you played the game.

I was pleased that all the pieces were still in the box, with the exception of the dice, so we used a dice website on a phone to roll out turns. See, I do like new stuff too.

The surprise was in the box under the board. Mindful that there were a finite number of notelets on which to cross off eliminated suspects, rooms and weapons as you play the game, we’d put some scrap paper in and written on those as kids.

My dad worked as an electrical wholesale rep, and often brought home old promotional leaflets and brochures that were out of date, as they were often one sided and so we children could write and draw on the reverse.

And in the box were three retail price lists for Chloride Exide Dry Batteries, torches lamps and bulbs, dated 1st October 1979.

This is fascinating. There are so many battery types there that aren’t in common usage now (PP1, PP6, flag, HP16). Many were those larger square/rectangular 6 or 9 volt batteries that sat in the back of a transistor radio and were surprisingly heavy. Modern equipment will typically use multiples of AAs to do the same thing, and with greater capacity as they’re alkaline. There’s another thing – this price list is before alkaline batteries were common, so these are all zinc chloride or zinc carbon. The sort of battery that leaks easily when it’s flat, and doesn’t last that long either.

And the prices! You might think, oh 12p for an HP7 (AA) battery, that’s cheap! But it’s not.

12p in 1979 is 61p in 2019, according to the Bank of England inflation calculator. 61p for one zinc carbon battery. Today, you can get a card of at least six, often ten similar batteries for £1. You can often get a card of 4 alkaline batteries for around £1, that’s 24p each for batteries that last a lot longer and are less prone to leak.

So, I do mostly like modern things, they’re generally better. But I like looking back at old stuff (and I may well post more about the Chloride Exide price sheet as I want to look up all those mysterious battery sizes). But I don’t like the new Cluedo.

You don’t get these any more!

The Mystery of the Missing Grape

One evening, a few months ago, I was watching TV and eating grapes. A nice healthy snack.

I dropped one. I looked for it, and couldn’t find it. On the floor? No. On the sofa? No. Under the sofa. That’s where it’ll have rolled. No.

I couldn’t find it. Next day, I looked again with the magic of daylight. Still couldn’t find it. I was anxious that is tread it into my carpet, but as I’d already searched and failed to find it.. well that risk was minimised at least.

I sent the robot vacuum cleaner to look for it. A grape is probably too large for it to sweep up, but I thought perhaps it’d dislodge it or roll it out of hiding. But it didn’t. No grape.

Over the next 2 months I occasionally wonders where the grape had gone to. Mice seemed the most logical, although I’d never seen any signs of mice in the house.

Then yesterday, I was cleaning the coffee table and I removed the clutter from its lower shelf to clean it.

And there on the lower shelf

was a plump home made raisin!

It’s tempting to taste it, but that didn’t seem too hygienic. I’m still pleased to have solved the mystery though.

And whilst I have an occasional frog in the shed, I don’t have mice in the house

Kitchen Sockets

I’m going to try to blog a bit more often about smaller things I’m doing. Quite often, I make or repair or modify something, but don’t blog about it because I forgot to take a before picture. So I don’t write about it. But I’ve decided not to let that stop me writing at least something, so perhaps there’ll be a bit more here.

That said, today I have a before and after pic. The sockets in the kitchen were hanging off the wall, as they’d been poorly installed. They were black ones, which could look nice, but easily show fingerprints.

wonky and loose

They don’t fit tightly against the wall as the box inside the wall has extra lugs that get in the way.

I hammered the lugs flat into the box, and put new MK sockets in their place.

Much nicer – and almost straight

The old sockets were missing an earth flyleaf to the metal box, so I put one of those on, and tidied up the wires a little bit.

The kettle, coffee maker and toaster go here

Power back in, all working and I made a cup of tea which tastes nicer now the socket is a good one

USB Washing Machine

About 6 weeks ago, I saw a Big Clive YouTube video about a Chinese USB powered “undies shredder” as he called it https://youtu.be/ugVRY-Cv7Ng

It caught my eye because, only a day or two before seeing this, I’d been wondering how to make a device to agitate water in a bucket to semi automate the washing of cleaning cloths and rags. I considered a twisted metal stick in a drill, buy hadn’t pursued this idea.

But now, here was the very thing!

Big Clive showed the device working in his video, and commented on how poor it is, but he was washing larger items of clothing. I just wanted to wash a few cloths.

So I ordered one.

And the other day, it arrived from China

A quality item

It sticks to the inside side of a bucket with its suction cups, and when plugged into a USB power supply or battery pack, it runs through a sequence of actions :

• It vibrates (claimed to be ultrasonic, but it isn’t)
• It rotates anticlockwise for a while
• it pauses
• it rotates clockwise for a while
• the sequence repeats

Although it’s not ultrasonic, the vibrating does agitate the water a fair bit. A slightly more expensive version of this unit also blows air into the water to make bubbles! But the back and forth rotation does work well, and sloshes light cloths and rags about very well.

If the above video doesn’t show, and you’re reading this in email, click the link in the email to view this page in a web browser

I washed all the cloths and rags I could find, and it got them surprisingly clean. I’m very pleased with it.

I can run it from a solar charged usb battery, so it’s running costs are nil compared to running the washing machine, and it uses a lot less water this way.

I now need to do more cleaning so I have more dirty rags to wash.