Battery choice: 9V vs 6 AAs

I took it as a joke. I also have a Fluke tester that is good for general electrical work around a work place or home that is about $ 100. It uses the AA batteries..It looks sort of like a bannana, yellow and all. Has a gap in one end to measure AC current, does ohms to about 1000 and AC or DC voltages. Almost blow out proof. I have put it across some fuses in the ohm scale while 250 volts was on them.

smaller, easier, more expensive long-term, less convenient.

a 9V has about as much energy as 1.5 AAs so you'd have replaced the 9v 4 times before the AAs would run out, the figures on retail price are even worse.

I've seen one that used 4AA

I had a set that used 8 AA in each one. That was around 1965. Back then there seemed to be two types. One had a good receiver,and the other type did not have a very good receiver.

There are always exceptions.

But I bet most of the cheap ones used 9v batteries.

You could get better ones, using superhet receivers but still 100mW input to the transmitter, and those probably went to AA. But they were more expensive, and less common.

Michael

And there's the rate-of-consumption factor. This externsive analysis of the impact of current drain on measured capacity:

shows that how fast you suck electrons out of a battery/cell can have a signficant effect on how many mA a device can consume for how long before its voltage drops.

Unfortunately, the comparison doesn't include 9V "N" alkalines.

Hope this contributes to the discussion.

Frank McKenney

That's an interesting point. I can't recall ever seeing a toy or gadget ruined by leaking 9V batteries, or not working because of poor contact with them --- whereas I've seen both problems with sets of AAs.

So if I ran out of AAs but not 9Vs, I could run it on a 9V, just more expensively & with more frequent battery changes. That's interesting to know.

about 20 times more frequent, but if it saves you when your in a jam...

I did just think that the internal resistance is higher too, so for some things that have intermittent high current draw it might not be workable at all.

I've got a fluke that uses 4 AA's. (Damn thing chews through batteries about every month.)

George H.

My Sanwa "AU-32" uses neither 9V nor AAs, but 4 AAAs instead. But it's not really a DMM either - more like an "AMM" with some digital parts that do the auto-ranging and auto-polarity-switching with comparators, latches and many discretes for timing. Also it looks like it uses the mid-supply connection between the battery pairs for some purpose.

Dimitrij

I own a Fluke 187 that uses 4 AAs.

I have both. I have one DMM which uses two, not four, AAs. One from ~35 years ago used four of them. I remember that zeroing had to be done manually with a dedicated button at each power-on. But

My experience, admittedly limited (and limited more because I wasn't looking at the insides of a whole bunch of DMMs) was that they used AA batteries.

I wasn't saying one way or another against meters that used 9v, just suprrised when I got one that used a 9v battery.

Michael