Die another day

Batteries of one sort or another bedevil me, as I suspect they do all of us. (Aside to any Amish readers: No, I didn't mean to include you, and how are you reading this, anyway?) Often as not, they're not even included, which means, often as not, a second trip to the store. Before I took delivery of my car this summer, I requested (well, actually, demanded, since I had it added to the contract) that a new battery be installed, as I had no faith in the one already there.

But lesser batteries can cause grief of their own. At the suggestion of my dental hygienist a few years back, I bought a Sonicare turbocharged toothbrush, which has generally served me well, even though I couldn't figure out how the charger gizmo worked, inasmuch as it has no metal connections of any kind other than in the wall plug. (Eventually I learned that it was some form of transformer: primary winding in the base, secondary in the handle, and magnetism does the rest.) A good thing, I suppose, since you're likely to plunk it down in the base while it's dripping wet. Originally, a full charge would last a couple of weeks; now it's down to a couple of days. This is fairly typical nickel-cadmium behavior, but there's no way to replace the cells, which means that shortly this thing will become a small, irregular rolling pin. Maybe the recyclers will take it as is, so I don't have to throw it away. (Cadmium is nasty stuff.)

Replaceable cells aren't always an improvement, especially if the device has a prodigious hunger for them. I have a speakerphone on my desk. The phone line powers the speaker, but the Caller ID subsystem takes three AA cells, and it takes them about every two months. (If you fail to feed it, the machine responds by killing the contrast on the LCD screen until you can only read it while hanging from the chandelier, a problem inasmuch as I don't have a chandelier.) Perhaps newer models have lower battery drain; I have an 18-month-old Olympus digital voice recorder that's still on its original set of AAAs.

Of course, if all this stuff ran directly off the grid, God knows what would happen to my electric bill.

Posted at 3:52 PM to Family Joules