Okay. It sounds like I’m blowing this out of proportion with a title like that. But seriously. Get yourself a battery tester. I can’t believe how much it’s come in handy.
As a homeowner, a father of a kid with too many damned battery operated toys, a person who does amateur electronics and person who regularly bought and sold electronics on your Offer Ups and E-bays, I found myself stumbling over batteries all the time, constantly.
I’d scratch my head and wonder from whence the battery came, and if it was any good, and usually I’d just discard it not really thinking of a way to know. Some people talk about the battery drop test but I’ve never found that to be effective myself.
Once, after cleaning my garage, I found somewhere in the magnitude of ten AA, AAA and button batteries scattered around. Out of frustration I finally decided to look up how I could test these with my multimeter. I felt like a genius for thinking of that at the time, and one or two of the batteries were even good.
Then I had an epiphany that there was probably a device built to do just this and prevent me from having to probe (haha, probe) each battery, because it was already becoming tedious.
Sure enough, there was, and once I found one I’ve never looked back.
This device paid for itself. About 20-25% of the batteries I’ve found have had charge and I haven’t had to throw them away. What I’ve also found is that the batteries in electronics often wear down asymmetrically such that if you have 3 or 4 batteries in a device, it’s common that one or two will still have a significant amount of juice when it stops working.
This one has an analog gauge, and the positive terminal slides so that it can fit any battery, D, C, AA, AAA and even watch batteries can be tested and based on where the positive terminal is, the device automatically adjusts to test the correct voltage. And of course your battery powers the gauge, so it doesn’t require an external power source, which probably goes without saying.
Imagine if it didn’t work that way, and you had to plug it in. It’s like if you had to put batteries in your outlet tester.
It’s such an obnoxiously simple yet useful device, and one of the few things I’ve bought that makes me feel smart every time I use it. I almost want to say it’s not something everyone needs, but if you change batteries a lot it’ll save you money just in keeping those batteries that haven’t fully worn out, so it’s probably good for any household.