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Old 15th Feb 2024, 12:49 am   #1
Backtoreality
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Ossett, West Yorkshire, UK.
Posts: 399
Default Dry Cell Battery Life

I'm sure like me everyone had had the dreaded leakage of dead (or not even dead) batteries in old radios and other battery powered equipment. It seems to me to even be a big problem with some new alkaline batteries, particularly AA and AAA cells.
I've recently had to clean up battery compartments with Duracell, Aerocell and others that weren't particularly old. Of course I don't know if the Duracell's were genuine or counterfeit. The others I bought from Aldi or Lidl.

Any to get to the point, last Sunday I bought a disposable camera for 50 pence. It's an Asda 35mm which says use before 10-2000 in bold lettering. When I got it home thought I'd take some photos indoors and thought I'd have to replace the battery in the camera. I opened the cardboard outer but then decided to try to charge the flash before I got any further into it.
The familiar whine commenced immediately! (My hearing obviously isn't as bad as my wife thinks!) and the neon lamp illuminated quite promptly! I've now taken 3 flash photos with no apparent deterioration in battery capacity!
The battery must be at least 25 years old! Is this a record or has anyone else had a battery last this long?
I'm going to try to use the rest of the film fairly quickly so I can possibly ID the make of battery.
Regards everyone,
David
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Old 15th Feb 2024, 9:49 pm   #2
Joe_Lorenz
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Join Date: Dec 2019
Location: Hohenroda, Eastern Hesse, Germany
Posts: 448
Default Re: Dry Cell Battery Life

Hello, that's amazing but not totally surprising to me. I've got two other examples for long living dry cells:

1. In my younger days I did a lot of Polaroid photography. Every film pack used to contain a very flat about 5 cm x 5 cm sized battery which I used to remove and keep before disposing of the rest. I still have some, and they are neither leaky nor totally dead. I think from the 1980s all of them.

2. In a 1960s British Army "Tannoy Apparatus Loudspeaking" I found some army-green vintage AA cells, "Property of Her Majesty". Over the decades they have gone almost dumb now but not a single one became leaky.

Joe
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