Hi Have you ever had a product where you have opened it up to change the batteries only to remember they've been in there a long time and maybe I left it switched on? perhaps? And oops. I Hope the batteries haven't leaked and then you open it up to find Wat Wat Wat. Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common site and a lot of people have their favorite culprits. Juror cells leak.

Every one of them energizes, every one of them leaks, this name-brand leaks, this one doesn't, etc. etc. Well, in this particular case, I'm - Juror cells failed and - generic Cole's brand Alka lines are worked fine. So I thought I'd actually run some long-term controlled experiments on battery leakage and see if there is any bias towards particular brands leaking in ones that don't.

Let's go. You can see the horrific end result. So what we're actually looking at here is the leakage of potassium hydroxide from the battery. And that's pretty caustic stuff, but it actually combines with the carbon dioxide in the air and that forms little potassium carbonate crystalline structures that we actually see here.

That's these little white crystal structures and they can really look quite intricate and fancy. It's it's quite nice to actually look at, although it pretty much eats away all your battery terminals and ruined your gear and ruins your day. But yes, funky to look at though. And of course, there's various advisories from manufacturers you know don't mix both old and new cells, don't mix brands and things like that, and well, you know how much truth there is to that.

I'm not entirely sure, but of course, if you mix old and new cells, of course, when they discharge, potentially some of the good cells can actually reverse charge the the dead cells when they die out first. And well. that can potentially cause issues like this, but isn't that wonderful? Either way, that can really ruin your day and you have to clean out your products, get some isopropyl alcohol, and clean them all out. And hopefully it hasn't corroded the terminals and you've got to the product quick enough.

But sometimes, yeah, your terminals can actually rust and corrode away. They get eaten away. Yeah, look at that. There's some growth on that one there.

That's that's pretty horrible. If you don't clean that quick, that can really run away. So what I thought I'd do is get many different types of standard alkaline batteries and drain them in a sort of, you know controlled ish environment and see which ones leak and how long etc. It's going to be a long-term test.

We've got our standard Energizer Max with but you know, regular energizes with Power Seal technology so presumably protects your devices and so presumably these aren't going to leak. Does it guarantee really say anything about leaking In the guarantee? they're just. you know, in their opinion, do not install backwards charge put in. Fire are mixed with other battery types may explode or leak causing injury may leak.

Even though they have Power Seal technology, we've got our standard Duracell Copper top guaranteed for 10 years and storage. Do it long power reserve. These are all our brand-spanking-new By the way. there we go again.

May explode or leak or cause injury Double A blah blah Panasonic's look at this. the E Voltar anti leak protection triple tough coating. Thank God there's no way in hell these things are gonna leak. No siree.

Bob Ah may explode or leak. Okay, and we've got Vardar Made in Germany Huh I Don't want my German viewers fantastic. We'll give these a bill once again to may explode or leak Fujitsu Made in Japan Hi doll my Japanese viewers I'm fantastic I Like got these from Digi-key and we've got our coals. Alkaline coals is like a shoppings like a Walmart etype.

Shoppings are not quite warm art. It's like a grocery shopping center kind of thing. So these are just you know, one hung low brand or whatever. Then I've got these Eclipse ones straight from J car with the finest Chinese Ium chemicals available I'm sure Eclipse dud lays yeah.

All right Oh give them a bowl I'm sure they'll say they're gonna leak too. but anyway, we've got seven different types and I'm going to work two of them in series because that's a typical configuration. I'm going to put a load on the end of it and I'm gonna whack them in the box and see what happens. but I'm gonna get two different tests on each of these battery types.

One we'll just have them fresh from a pack in series, the other will have one fresh and one partially discharged just to see if the fresh one can actually attempt to recharge like or reverse charge the one that's already half depleted. And once again, this goes against the record manufacturer's recommendations of not put in like you know, half chopped, mixing new ones with old batteries and stuff like that. but it's as common as mud. So what I'm also gonna do is actually put them inside these clear containers as well.

They're not completely like airtight seal, but it just kind of like simulates an enclosed product. So if there is any hydrogen release from the battery you know it might build up and stuff like that so it may be that will like have an effect. I Don't know. but anyway, I'll put all.

so I'll have fourteen of these containers with two batteries of each ones to leave. This just go in for however long it takes days, weeks, months. I Don't know, we'll find out. Okay, so the plan is to use an electronic load to drain I Don't know about half the capacity out of one of the batteries.

so get all the different types I can work out for in series and drain a constant current out of this. Let's say I hundred milliamps I drain The capacity at 100 milliamps of an alkaline is around about 2500 milliamp hours. so let's drain half that or 1250 milliamp hours. This lobe will automatically stop when it's written, the that capacity is reached.

so 1.25 amp hours I've got it set to a constant current of 100 milliamps. so we'll go in there, stock capacity, stop timer doesn't matter and trigger. We're off and running and we'll eventually I'll spare the details, Take like you know, tens of hours. It'll drain 1200 milliamp hours of 1.25 amp hours out of these batteries.

and I'll do it with all seven types of batteries. It's still going right. So I've got seven Durai or half drained batteries in there. I've marked them with a couple of black marks on them and you know they're half dry.

Because we do the old drop test here we go. If we compare the good one to the this one bounces, the drained one bounces a lot more, and the good one, of course, the fully charged one you should actually be able to should be able to get that to stay a stand up. you're careful enough. Anyway, that's very cool.

I've done a whole video on that and so I'm gonna have to link that one at the end if you haven't seen it. So I've got seven half drained ones. I'm manufactured fourteen of these, so I'm gonna have fourteen test setups total. seven of them will have.

These are all batteries from the same batch, of course, from the same package. I'm going to put a half drained one and a full one in series. I've got a forty seven ohm resistor on here, so that'll be roughly about a fifty mili amp draw. You know, give or take, so it'll take probably like, you know, two and a half days or something to fully drain these things.

So I've got. so I'll have seven of them each in their individual wha tub with a half drained and a full one, and then another one containing two full ones brand-new and they're off in the same packets or whatnot. I'm not mixing any. there's buns and the goal is to eventually get some of these to leak.

That's the plan. They may not there. We have it. two stacks.

We've got seven with the half dead and the full end seven with the full battery. So I'll just leave those for a bunch of day, so have a look every day, but it should take a couple of days to drain these fully. But of course, I fully expect to have to leave these for like weeks or a month or something like that, perhaps. So this could be a really long-term thing, But hey, I guess this test doesn't really end until something leaks, dammit.

All right. I Gave up. It's been almost 10 months since I actually releases video on my second channel. subscribe to my second channel if you haven't seen it.

cuz I do videos like this? you wouldn't known about this. Yeah, March 6 the 20 and 19 I did this and these have survived the great Eevblog flood of 2019 and they've just been sitting on the windowsill over there for all that time. and well, unfortunately I think we've come a guts up. I Can't see any issues at all although I haven't taken them out and inspected each one, but there's nothing obvious in either of them.

This pile here are the ones that had the half-dream ones. These are the new in packet two of them in series so we've got the half drained ones and the full ones and well, I can't see anything. Let me take them out of the holders and I'll give you end on shots. But nah, so there here's the end caps of the the fully charged ones.

And if you don't know this, I've done a video on this. A lot of people think that the like: the outer metal shell of the battery is connected to the electrical negative terminal, but it's not. You can actually see in this particular one the Fujitsu's You can actually see the seal around there, so the outer case is actually connected to the positive in most cases like this. But anyway, let's go over.

even our dreaded Duracell ones are just fine. I Remember this is about the same agent vintages of those corroded ones that were inside my eevblog high voltage probe and they're all just fine. And there's nothing on the positive side either. but you'd expect the leakage to happen where the seal is which is on the negative, which is why we saw the leakage on the negative terminal of those ones inside my high voltage probe, but not look at that don't like bought ones and it's exactly the same result with the half drained ones as well.

There's just nothing wrong with these at all. zero leakage and zero crystalline growth. So even on the dreaded geocells there, they are just fine. That's a no result for the half drain batteries too.

So although we've completely come a guts are on this test of course, a no result is still a result. It tells us that either a all of these batteries all these brands are actually good and there's nothing wrong with them. and they don't leak at least after 10 months continuously connected to a 47 ohm load like this or B that we simply didn't have the right conditions. And as I said, these are not a sealed containers.

In fact, some of them actually cracked I Guess due to the UV exposure of being like a sitting on my windowsill. although they get its indirect UV They still get some so you know they became a bit brittle. but they weren't like the really good seal one. So these weren't hermetically sealed in any way.

So it's not like it, you know, ran out of carbon dioxide to absorb or something like that and couldn't grow the crystalline structures. So and or we got like we simply didn't have the right conditions in terms of the load because I think one person at least said on the original video 10 months ago that our forty seven Ohms is too low. You have to really like almost self discharge rate. which I think for an alkaline is like only like you know point two percent self discharge or something like that it is quite low and so I Thought you know a 50 milli amp draw? Maybe that was just too much and that's probably all I can think of is that maybe we should run this test again as long as it takes, but with a much lighter load off.

I Thought maybe mixing the batteries up with a full one and a dead one. The one with two stripes on them here would have you know, done the business, but it hasn't. So I think the money's probably honored that we had the load a bit too low. We're draining them a bit too fast and that somehow didn't give them time to build up pressure inside of what they needed.

Something like that? perhaps? I don't know if there any battery chemistry experts, battery construction experts out there? please let us know what the best load is. But yeah, I think we just have to rerun this experiment again with a a much much lighter load like a couple of orders of magnitude. lighter like, you know, not even point five milliamps like, you know, 50 micro amps or something like that. You know, really, sort of like low-level standby current.

Like something like, you know, an ammeter like this. You might get standby current of you know, tens of my cramps. That's 50 my cramps. I Think might be typical batteries.

Last you know for a couple of years in standby mode at 50 micro amps. so maybe that's the go. Alright, so let's just add in terminal test the batteries here and let's see if they've maybe they've recovered a little bit due to the electrochemistry. I've done videos on this and I'm what? the videos on batteries? actually? There you go.

That's 75 millivolt, so you know they've been out for a, you know, a few minutes and 30. So that's half. That was the half drained one, so that's interesting. The Energizer: whoa-ho-oh I It's negative.

You can see, then it's there. It's negative. one volt and this is what I was hoping would happen. What's this one? one volt? There you go.

So because this was the half drained one, the full drained one because I took about half capacity. That's interesting actually, because I took about, you know, 1250 milliamp hours. Half the capacity out of this. So you could say that half the capacity of this one has drained into this one and it's forced it to go basically negative one volt.

While this one's still positive, let's see if any others have done that. No, the Fugees are Fugees are fine coal's nope Panasonic no he clips are the Jake our specials. There you go, it might once again minus 1 volt plus 1 volt. that's interesting and the Jura cells negative that would be plus 1 volt because that's the that was the fully charged 1 and negative 1 volt.

So there you go. the Jura cells, the Eclipse and the energizer. They all went negative and so we base we reverse charge the batteries. Why it didn't happen in all of them I Don't know if anyone knows the electrochemical reason why some would do it reverse charge and some wouldn't when they were all pretty much equally discharged.

So you'd expect them to do that. but like they effectively are alternate balance they're at plus minus 1 volts. But that's interesting. Let's check out these ones over here and I wouldn't expect these ones although I have seen ones new out of the battery out of the packet that have actually self discharged cuz you can get like the odd dud battery and it's not as good as some of the others.

sorry I've got this. I've got the pros back to front, all the electrons are gonna fall out so which is there? They do literally fall out even with his light load. So yeah, they're all fine. Yep, as expected because they weren't the half discharged ones.

Cool, huh? So I'm afraid I'm going to have to while hand this one over to the audience. Please don't leave it in the comments. If you are like an expert in battery chemistry, battery construction something like that, please let us know the possibly the tests that'll give us the best odds of doing this. I Suspect it's exactly the same thing because batteries typically I have seen batteries leak and I've seen jurors cells leak much worse than any of the others, but that's only anecdotal.

Please leave it in the comments which ones you've seen leaked before. but I've also had Energizer's leak as well. and my Eevblog are high voltage probe available in my store down below by the way. possibly for the last time because our sapphire who actually manufactured this probe are.

well, they're they're trying to sell to someone at the moment and if the sale falls through then they will actually be shutting up shop and they simply won't manufacture any probes anymore. I guess I thought like the world leaders in these types of probes. Anyway, that's a fascinating story. Had that on the eevblog forum.

Anyway, I have seen the energizes. these are different these and they're now supplying Energizer Macs in here. but I have seen like the regular energizes like these ones in there before and I found in one case that just sitting in the they actually you know started to leak and corrode and stuff like that. but I've seen it more predominant in nature ourselves, so it's certainly possible to get these suckers - what? leek with no low, but like it most often happens when you've got sitting inside a product like this and it draws you know, tens of microns, 50 micro amps, or a little bit more standby.

It tends to happen in products like that, but it certainly happened without it. like I don't want to just like leave them sit in there doing nothing I want to put them under at least some sort of load Anyway, please leave it in the comments down below and I Guess you know if you see a comment down below that that person looks like they're reputable and they know what they're doing and you agree, Then give that comment a thumbs up and I will see whoever gets the best comment. Perhaps I might rerun this long-term test again and implement it, but even a negative result like this, it's it's still a result. None of them leaked I was just oh a bit disappointing.

but yeah, Murphy every time and I watched Pot Never Boils. well, that sort of stuff Anyway, hope you found the video interesting. If you did, please give it a big thumbs up. As always, you can discuss it down below.

Catch you next time. Oh, and follow me over on library TV as well because that's gonna be huge anyway. I've got like 1,400 subscribers now. Oh no dude, it's going Gangbusters.