Rechargeable Batteries

Jeff Atwood wrote an interesting article about Rechargeable Batteries¹ over at Coding Horror.

Every self-respecting geek loves gadgets. I'm no exception. And so many of my favorite gadgets have a voracious appetite for batteries. I don't know why all the other battery types fell so far out of favor, but between AA and AAA, I could probably power 95% of my household gadget needs.

I stopped using rechargeable batteries a little over a year ago because I was having trouble with the super-fast 15 minute chargers just killing the batteries, but the article peaked my interest again…

Enter the La Crosse Technology BC-900 AlphaPower Battery Charger².

The BC-900 is different than most of the chargers I've used. The BC-900 is geeky:

• Charge at various rates, from 200/500/700/1000mA
• Discharge at 1/2 the charging rate
• Test to determine true battery capacity
• Refresh to "revitalize" older batteries
• LCD readouts for each battery
• and more!

I ended up ordering a BC-900 from Thomas Distributing. Hopefully it will live up to the hype.

I think the next step will be to get myself some of those Sanyo Eneloops — they seem to be recommended by a lot of people.

1. The author seems to conflate discharge rate and increased capacity, but overall the article is good [↩]
2. Featured in the Coding Horror article and suddenly Out-Of-Stock at Amazon until May 29th 2008 [↩]