After asking about whether anyone would be interested in sending us some fun gadgets and toys I’ve had a fair few turn up for me! Some geeky, and some just practical!

The one that I’ve been using a lot is this one… the UniRoss battery… And before you ask no I wasn’t using them for anything dodgy or bizarre… I decided to put them into my Xbox 360 controllers and see how they lasted. So far they are doing just as well as the ordinary ones! I matched one set up against the other… brand new vs rechargeables…. the rechargeables are still going the others… well the less said about them the better! They died with a month! OK so we play with the 360 quite a bit

When using the batteries you wouldn’t know the difference between the two… Well except for the fact that the Uniross ones I can re-charge and reuse. Something that you wouldn’t expect from the team over at UniRoss is that they are actually they are really, really geeky mad about batteries. And more to the point about the technology behind them and the use of re-usable batteries (and their impact on “Green”). So I thought I’d delve a bit deeper into the story of the battery. I’m always interested in green stuff and sensibly reducing my carbon footprint. By that I mean not leaving the lights on, turning off the heating when it’s not needed and so on. Since I was tiny I’ve had it drilled into me to use rechargable batteries for gadgets. (although back then they always died really quickly and I was constantly re-charging them – very annoying)

The subject of charging stuff came up the other day in a conversation and someone I know suggested that charging stuff is really bad in comparison to just having stuff turned on when you need it. So when the details about these batteries and chargers came in I thought it would be good to get to the bottom of some of the myths about batteries. Were they right, you should use only what you need when you need it… and charging is wasteful… or are disposable batteries one use only worse or better than re-chargeable ones? I started with Defra… after all they should know they created the Producer Responsibility: Batteries Directive. This was a bit of an eye opener, I didn’t realize that there was a whole UK directive on it… and that companies will have a legal obligation to make them greener… You’d never have known that from the way that disposable batteries are marketed these days…

So then I went on to WRAP’s site (WRAP helps individuals, businesses and local authorities to reduce waste and recycle more, making better use of resources and helping to tackle climate change.) They did a recent test to find out what the barriers and the myths of batteries are and it makes for interesting reading… the key takeaways from this are as follows:

Battery facts & figures

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Around 600 million UK household batteries (22,000 tonnes) – the equivalent weight of 110 Jumbo Jets – are sent to landfill unnecessarily every year

Nine out of 10 people would recycle batteries if there was a door-to-door battery collection scheme in their area

The average household uses 21 batteries a year, all of which could be recycled

89% of batteries are for general use and can be found in every room in the house

You can tell your batteries are running low or used up by:

  • testing them in a torch or clock
  • using a battery tester

All non-lead acid battery types can be recycled through WRAP’s trial schemes, including both rechargeable and non-rechargeable batteries and battery packs from electronic and electrical equipment:

  • Alkaline manganese
  • Zinc-carbon
  • Nickel Cadmium (NiCd)
  • Lithium Ion (Li-ion)
  • Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH)
  • Single-use Lithium
  • Silver Oxide
  • Zinc Air

Re-chargeable batteries have a lifetime so they don’t last forever but they do have benefits… you can re-use them multiple times and don’t have to worry about them not being in the house, office etc. The chargers these days have a timeout switch that stops over charge and some chargers have a quick charge function that cuts down the time to cha
rge them. (don’t ask me how the magic there works… I just know that it does – that would need an electronics and battery geek to explain further!) Until recently re-chargeable batteries had a faster discharge rate and provided lower power output so didn’t always work in all devices (generally this is not the case these days).

So next time you think about buying some batteries, consider spending that little bit extra on re-chargables and a charger unit. It does save money in the long term and is much better on the eco-system!

PS. thanks to Matt Churchill (aka funky pr geek from Grant Butler Coomber) for reminding me about using re-chargeable batteries. :) (I admit I had disposables in the 360 til then! Oops!)

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Gadgets, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.