The Amazing TV Remote Dead Battery Trick
Wifely just did it & reminded meself: Open the battery compartment, spin ’em around a bit in place. Voila. Works over and over agin. It’ll buy you a week or a month or a year.
Google sez moi not zactly 1st re this, but I’m the first person we know in our house to think of it, and danged if don’t it work.
Working on The Amazing Dead Goldfish Trick: no luck yet but will advise. So far, spinning them in place has no effect.
LATE ADD: Although it’s kind of addictive.
If that doesn’t work, sometimes rotating the batteries does. Spinning doesn’t work on one of my remotes, but rotating does.Report
Rotating means switching the batteries’ places? That usually works for me.Report
I’ve always automatically done the same without actually thinking about it. I wonder however, wy it works. Presumably, there is some circuit issue. Turning the batteries closes the circuit.
But does it do so merely because the battery was actually dislodged and the act of turning the battery happens to push the battery back into contact with the electrodes?
Or is there some kind of oxide collecting on the surface of the electrode and thus blocking the folow of electrons and turning the battery grinds away said oxide and exposing the metal surface again?
Or is there some third option that I am not thinking about?Report
The battery is chemical, after all. My initial SWAG would be that rotating the batteries (or changing their positions) mixes up the stuff on the interior and gets you a bit more reaction out of it.Report
It’s oxides. The battery contacts, and the contacts in the remote, are generally not gold plated, and steel isn’t the best conductor in any case (maybe it is tinned). Also, some of the time there’s damage to a contact from a battery that has leaked. If spinning doesn’t work, taking the batteries out and wiping the contacts on a shirt or with a alcohol soaked swab, might. A similar trick is sometimes needed for non-gold-plated headphone plugs.Report
Battery terminals and the contacts in battery holders are almost all nickel-plated for durability and corrosion resistance (and appearance for the batteries themselves, since nickel can be polished to be nice and shiny). Given sufficient time, though, it will oxidize. Rubbing the contacts and terminals with or on a pencil eraser will also usually do the trick.Report
If you don’t already have one, a cheap battery tester can often save you some batteries – I often find that only one of them is totally dead (esp. in the kids’ toys, for some reason), the rest may have at least some life left in them. Without a tester you’ll just end up throwing them all out.Report
I’m not sure I understand the principle behind battery testers. Does the voltage diminish as the charge is expended? How does this not affect the functioning of battery-operated devices?Report
I’m guessing it’s a combination of voltage (which will degrade slowly over time) and amperage (a dead battery won’t produce any, while a dying battery won’t produce enough.)Report
I converted to rechargeable batteries some years back. Costco, in typical fashion, had an enormous pack of every sort of Eneloop batteries imaginable and a charger to go with them. Over the years a few of them wouldn’t hold a charge and I went to the Energizer rechargeables, but I’ll never buy a lead-acid battery again.
The lens on my camera cracked and I had to replace it. I’d gotten it on sale at Worst Buy and they had a replacement. I pulled the battery out of the wounded camera and it stays in my camera bag now as a spare.Report
This: lead-acid batteries are for suckers. We have a bag of them for emergencies and rotate them through some of our appliances, but the electronics that get regular use all have rechargeables.Report
Aren’t standard batteries pretty much being phased out altogether? It seems to me that just about everything I’ve bought in recent years has had a built-in rechargeable battery.Report
Standard replaceable batteries will be around for cheap, short-lived, or very small products for a long time. Adding a charge controller to a buck-and-a-half (wholesale price for lots in the tens of thousands) remote control is prohibitively expensive. Ditto for cheap cameras, or kids’ toys with a short expected lifetime. Most rechargeables have a much shorter shelf-life than contemporary alkaline disposables — the long shelf-life is important in a flashlight that sits for months at a time between uses. Adding the external connector for a charger for a hearing aid or wristwatch is impractical.Report
I do this all the time and thought I was crazy for doing it but it worked so I just ran with it. Kind of glad to know I’m not the only one.Report