50 Dying batteries: Can they be shorted by cardboard if humid enough?

No, they're just crap.

No.

I buy 'brand name' dollar store batteries and they're fine. The dollar store button cells may be another story.

Most likely 'fake' Energizer batteries. Common problem, take a very cheap import battery, put a new lable on it, and sell it for *more* than it is worth!

As to moist cardboard draining them, IMHO unlikely unless the cardboard or moisture has some contamination (salt?) that increases conductivity.

Easy enough to test, just put some (say two or three) batteries in series and connect to cardboard while measuring the current. Bet it reads zero.

I think you got scammed with sub-standard (or very outdated) batteries.

PeterD said something like:

...[rip]...

I've heard of such things....is there a way to distinguish batteries I wonder?

Yep, but I am also wondering about the acidity. I know from my comic book collection years that all paper products, and in *particular* brown corregated cardboards, are far below PH-7. I don't know if there is a salt that is in it, or something else very mildly conductive. I'm getting more convinced from you guys however that I'm barking up the wrong tree here...

With my multimeter, a miniscule current flow would be within the noise.

Understood. It's also possible that the seller doesn't know /his/ supplier well enough, though I'm certainly not making assumptions in any direction right now.

I did notice that a couple of the batteries didn't have dates on them at all. And some of those had "made in singapore" stamped on their sides. Is it possible for energizer to be manufactured there on occassion?

The seller to me buys the energizer-AA's in bulk lots of 5000. He is interested in getting to the bottom of this---is there a way for him to know what's what? I have moved beyond caring about this particular order and am interested in figuring out /how/ to safely buy batteries cheaply.

For example, the children's toys eat up AA's like candy, and we have a baby swing chair that uses more C batteries than a woman's prison... ;)

I recently ordered on eBay 100 energizer AA batteries.

I tested them using a simple battery tester from radio shack. 4 were dead, one was near death, and 95 were at an identical high mark, but just a "little" below an energizer I bought from a retail package from Home Depot. The tester is simple and unmetered, save for a "75%" mark. The needle moves up to almost the same spot as my control (retail) battery does.

They were shipped in 2 corrugated cardboard boxes, roughly the height of an AA cell. 50 in each, all standing up on the negative (flat) end. So (especially if they are stacked) the top and bottom of all the batteries are touching the top and bottom of the cardboard box. HUGE speculation: If the cardboard is even minutely conductive (humidity, acidity, or whatever) then I have effectively a wired in parallel 1.5V "50xAA-amp" "battery" that is shorting through its own packaging (?)

Is there another possibility for this, other than just lesser quality batteries? And is the cardboard shorting even possible? I'm working with the seller to try to figure this one out. He's asking about possibly putting a plastic or foam sheet above or below them. I'd appreciate your thoughts on all of this.

So I ran a little test. Somewhat humid cardboard (sitting in my unheated garage in Seattle in the middle of winter) measures over 100 megohms on my multimeter. Sopping wet cardboard (tapwater) measures 1 megohm. Test points 3" apart although it didn't seem to matter much.

Energizer rated at 2850 mah Leakage into wet cardboard would be 1.5/1000= .0015 ma. Time to discharge battery would be 2850/.0015=1.9 million hours or somewhat over 200 years.

I suppose the water could have contained more ions than my tap water but knowing that the human body is quite conductive I also checked the resistance across my tongue and found it to be 1/10 that of the cardboard so it would still take over 20 years to discharge the battery. I guess I would look elsewhere for the dead battery gremlin.

You got ripped off.

Report the seller to ebay's fraud department and have the idiot banned from ebay. If more people would report these scammers it might make it a better shopping experience.

Pretty extreme retribution toward someone whose product was 96% satisfactory and who was working with the buyer to resolve the problem. Perhaps you could share your Ebay id with the group so we could avoid doing business with you.

Do we "really" know the seller was working to solve the problem? OR just blowing off the buyer with a bunch of questions - he himself may have had no clue of? I'm not saying the seller wasn't trying to resolve the issue - but there is no way to prove it. It is as we've seen, a far stretch to imagine "cardboard shipping container" to short out batteries. OR some being dead as I believe was also the case.

In buying bulk, you're probably always going to have some defective product show up - I've had it happen to me. Actually, maybe the seller could have offered to reimburse some money for loss - but if "he" wasn't BSing the buyer, then he had about as much knowledge and chance for a refund - as the buyer seems to have had. Us trying to prove the case for the buyer OR seller - most likely won't make a damned bit of difference to the original supplier if the seller indeed relied on one.

When you factor in all the product in a "bulk" deal - you figure out your per piece cost and then see what you've lost. Is it worth dicking around trying to prove anything - or just toss in the trash and forget about it? Batteries in bulk are usually pretty cheap. At our local store, I can buy a

Just my 2 cents

You can buy rechargeable alkalines. They'd be good in service like this.

You can also recharge regular alkalines with the charger. They say you can't but you can.

I can buy an 8 pack for $1 here. They're good. The fake Energizer 12 per pack are total crap.

Yeah, that's a sure sign of crap IME.

Kind of reminds me when i bought a brick of what i thought was Duracell's AA's. after the first set of cells died in a short lived period, i noticed they said Duraking and had the same copper top casing and all.

Radiosrfun said something like:

All such notions were mine from the start. The buyer isn't the one with the questions. He is just interested in what I discovered, and seems to be genuine in this, or so I think.

Your wording here is a little unclear to me, but I'll try to clear it up by saying that the seller *did* offer me a full refund. I didn't press him on this to see if it included shipping or not, but I think he would have.

Discussions are valuable when they instruct, so this seems like a worthwhile conversation. There's much here for me to learn about the consumer battery world, and I'll leave it at that.

You don't need to bid on the item to report fraud, hell I've had a few crooks banned before their auction was over. All in the test equipment department.

Is there a reliable 3rd party battery reviewer/tester/etc. ? Perhaps consumer reports? Or does anyone else know of any?

I can tell you from a fairly thorough experiment of mine involving a Sony Walkman (analog audio casset tape) in the gym for nearly 2 hours every day, that AA-energizer (classic energizer, not e2 or anything else fancy) beat duracell's standard coppertop alkaline every single time. Big thorough experiement, but very narrowly focused on 2 brands, one device, and one "way" of using it (left on with no stops and restarts). But it was without deviation: E beat D in this narrow case.

But what of BJ's "Berkely & Jensen" OEM'd brand? Or any of the other million mumble names out there, probably 99% of them originating in asia. Any good ones people like?

Jack said something like:

If you found that it would take 20 years to discharge a battery shorted by your tongue, I'm suspicious that there's a miscalculation or broken metric somewhere.

'Fake' Energisers ?

Do they have 'fake' written on them ?

Graham