Trying the Rosewill Alkaline Battery Charger
December 5, 2010 – 3:04 amRecently, newegg.com had the Rosewill alkaline battery charger (RGD-CT505) on sale for $9.99, a good discount of the normal $29.99. I read a lot of the reviews, and many complained about not all batteries working, leaking, and diminished use of batteries over time. For $9.99, I was willing to give it a try. Heh, immediately after putting in my order, I started to rethink my impulse purchase. For $9.99, I could just about buy a brand new, problem free set of NiMh batteries. Plus, there have been some recent deals for large packs of regular alkaline batteries for free after rebate.
Oh well, I’ve spent much more on other impulse buys. This was worth at least trying. After all, I have a virtually infinite supply of alkaline batteries available to me. At my workplace, we have battery recycling bins, and I’ve been tapping into them for a while. You’d be surprised at how many batteries I’ve been able to salvage. Oftentimes, when you use several batteries together, one battery will go bad, and thus the set doesn’t have enough juice overall. To me, these batteries get tossed way too early. Plus, even if they all lost their charge equally, some devices don’t need as much voltage to work. I’ve been able to subside for quite a while on used batteries in my Apple bluetooth mouse at work.
One useful caveat in the reviews I read was that the charger didn’t like batteries that were already highly discharged. Before starting my test, I separated a batch of batteries into three bags, one for batteries less than 1.1V, batteries less than 1.4V, and batteries above 1.4V. The ones below 1.1V are probably not worth trying, and the ones above 1.4V are still somewhat usable as is. So, I’m focusing on the batch in the midrange.
The instructions said to charge for 4 hours. So, I let them charge from 10:33pm to 2:33am. Here’s what I’ve found so far:
| ID | Brand | V start | V end | V resting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Energizer | 1.347 | 1.577 | |
| 2 | Duracell | 1.347 | 1.577 | |
| 3 | Duracell | 1.222 | 1.522 | |
| 4 | Duracell | 1.297 | 1.555 |
I recorded the voltage fresh off the charger, but what matters more is the resting voltage. I measure that tomorrow. However, so far, the results are promising. At the moment, I’m not really interested in doing any scientific testing of the these batteries. As long as they keep my Nintendo Wii controllers and blinking red lights on my bike working, I’m happy =)