You know those little flat ones, about the size of an aspirin?
If I propped one somehow into my battery charger in the AAA slot, maybe wedged in between an AAA battery and the spring, would that work?
They all seem to be 1.5 volts like any other single cell battery.
NO! Very bad idea. Most are not designed to be recharged at all and if you try it they can and will short out or explode spewing hot, caustic material everywhere.
Like Astro says, very bad idea - especially the way you were going to do it.
I have, in rare situations, “recharged” a small battery enough to finish somethign I was working on. My multimeter uses oversized watch batteries, and I use but rarely. Sometimes when I need it, the batteries will have gone bad. What I do then will make some of you cringe - and I don’t like to do it either. I’ll take a DC powersupply and give the battery a short (seconds long) jolt. The battery gets hot even in that short period, so doing more is really a bad idea. The jolt will revive the battery enough for me to get finished with what I’m doing - and buy a replacement battery the next day.
Do not recharge non-rechargeable batteries. You can hurt yourself badly.
:eek: :eek:
That’s far worse than connecting the battery to a charger. Battery chargers are constant current sources, not constant voltage, so it won’t put out an excessive amount of current. A DC voltage supply will push far more current into a battery than a charger. I once tried to see if a 12V 2-amp voltage supply can charge a 12V SLA battery. (I was 12 yrs old, it seemed logical.) The fuse tripped, of course, but not before the insulation on the wires melted.
But even with a proper charger, I wouldn’t recommend it. The savings are not worth the risks.
Ok, we’ve established that one must not attempt to recharge a regular lithium watch battery… But is there such a thing as a rechargeable coin cell? Specifically the cr2016, about the size of a quarter, 3.0 lithium battery? I had thought I read something about these once before and this post jogged my memory.
This would be great for my LED hobby.
jngl
Those 1.5 V watch cells are not lithium. They are either silver oxide or alkaline cells. Lithiums always have a voltage of 3 V per cell. None of those formulations is especially rechargeable. The reactions are mostly irreversible, but as pointed out, some recharging can occur. It’s not advisable, however, since the major byproducts of such attempts are heat and water vapor, which can cause the small cells to burst.
Ahh, the light-emitting diode. Truly, a miracle of modern science.
Hijack-Have you found a way to remove the nigh microscopic LED’s from old cell phones?
wow, no one answered you? yes, there are rechargeable button batteries for CR2032 and other sizes as well. the prefix changes depending on who’s manufacturing it but the numbers will stay the same. Maxwell is ML2032, LIR2032 for generics, VL for panasonic, etc… they even make charging docks for button batteries.
best way to search is to just do “rechargable button battery XXXX” where “XXXX” is the 4-digit number delineating the battery size.
Actually, the cheap stores ( in Britain = your dollar stores ) sell sheets of about 20 of an assortment of these flat batteries, including watch and computer types, for £1. This is bound to be the same everywhere, coming no doubt from China; and even if crap, lasting only a year ( although they seem to last as well as the better sort ) it’s preferable to trying to recharge old ones.
Separately, one can in the same vein get a pack of 6 CR2032 for a £1, and my desktop is using one now. The regular sort are about £1.50 each in a supermarket.
Fourteen years later it’s possible the OP has found different solutions for their LED hobby.
Or blown themselves up-- that may have been their last post.