New update on cheap batteries

Tempest Owners
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Just 200 days ago, I Ioaded SKY and AIR with new, cheap, supermarket, alkaline batteries, at about €0.17 each. They worked fine.

Over the last two days, ALL the variables from both devices were flatlining. I thought that 200 days were reasonable and perhaps the time had come to have a look at the voltages:
AIR
On list 2.93
Between gold-plated electrodes 2.943
Individual cells 1.471 - 1.472 (open circuit)
SKY
On list 2.63
Between electrodes 2.625
Individual cells 1.313 - 1.316

Nothing out-of-the-ordinary there, except that, at 2.63 V, I would not have expected flatlining . However, I decided to change the SKY batteries. The new ones gave 3.18 V on the list and 3.192 on the electrodes.

Cost: 12 cells/6 month @ €0.17 = ~€4.10/year against ~€14/year for recommended batteries: no brainer if one doesn’t mind changing them twice/year.

Question: I’ve seen on some sites that the battery voltages are displayed on the list of variables on the Android device and/or in Windows. How do I get these to display? Sorry if I’m a plouc!

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Turn the battery card on in the app settings. Also gives you graphs of the discharge, where you can geek out at how temperature impacts voltage.

If only one battery card shows, turn it off in the app, save your settings, turn it on again, and save again to make both appear…

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Thanks, that did the trick. Often the simplest things baffle most :worried:

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Hi @bne,

I agree with you, so long as we are warmer than freezing temperature.
Those of us who never experience temperatures below 0 deg C are much better off financially using ordinary Alkaline batteries.
And we are also able to plan ahead for when to change the batteries. We avoid the problem of the Lithium batteries diving off the voltage cliff so quickly at the end of their life.
With Alkaline we get a nice gradual slope with weeks to plan a nice day to change them.
Your Air batteries could last much longer! Even my Sky batteries I run down to 2.2V.
cheers Ian :slight_smile:

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