I picked up some rechargeable batteries and what I thought was an overkill charger on Amazon, thinking I would have a long term power solution for my AA-dependent wireless peripherals. So far it has only caused me headache.
The batteries seem to be under-powering my peripherals. I’ve tried to use them between multiple wireless keyboards, mice and even Steam controllers and they always start off ok and then the devices start dropping out after a few hours of use, quickly becoming unusable. When I pop in some normal alkaline AA’s, everything works as expected.
When I try to recharge them, I get nonsensical readouts from the charger. Some register as fully charged, some as null, and in my case, the 3rd charging bay always tries to charge the battery and it becomes very hot.
I have AAA versions in front of me right now as I remembered I have them in my closet for my EDC flashlight, the warning on the packaging says to dispose if used.
anyways, I also have these and they are working out quite well.
I use the standard ones in my steam controller and they last a respectable amount of time, sorry no actual time data from me.
I was gonna get the pros when in was buying them but they were more expensive, I do not have ready access to IKEA, and upon reading the use case on the packets went with the white ones. They say the pros are for high discharge current things like camera flashes where the white ones are general use.
That said if you have an IKEA near, totally go for the own brand pro ones. Pick up like 3 or 4 packs for the same as 1 of the eneloops.
As for chargers, I have no experience with them, so I just bought the panasonic eneloop charger with the batteries. What with horror stories of fires and over charging.
Good charger, well made, good at a glance charge indication plenty fast (less than 6 hours by far but again no data from me)
You can generally use any Ni-MH charger and not care. I have these interesting Energizer 15 min chargers, but the backfire of that is they shorten battery lifespan quite quickly. Burn through so many AAs when I was using it to recharge batteries for a Wii remote.
Ok, cool. I think the Opus should be good. It was recommended on some “make your own powerwall” type blog. It managed to “charge” several unchargeable batteries for hours on end without burning down my apartment. Let’s call that a stress test.
