So there’s a drawer in my house where all loose batteries go. The idea was that we would test batteries, properly store good ones, properly dispose of bad ones and generally stay on top of our battery needs.
Look life is busy and messy and what it actually became was a disordered, possibly dangerous holding place for an endlessly deferred tedious chore. Also the battery tester wasn’t working properly.
Every time I would find a loose battery and stick it there or need a working battery and look for it there I would think “One day, when I have time, I will figure out this tester problem, test these batteries and organize this drawer”.
Today is that day! It took 5 days of self-isolating and first I baked my own bread, repaired a vacuum cleaner, learned to machine darn from YouTube and mended two pairs of jeans with crotch rips, but I have fixed the tester and am about 3/4 of the way to battery storage paradise!
I have a number of fully charged button batteries, the ones the size of coins and the little tiny ones the size of pencil erasers. How can I store these in a way they don’t touch each other, get lost, or otherwise avoid their intended destiny?
My idea is that I can tape them to index cards and store these in an index card box, but is that safe? I don’t know enough about how batteries work to know, but some of you do.
Tell me if this will work or if you have better storage/organizing ideas, thanks!
OTOH, if you leave sticky tape on the batts for long enough, the tape will leave a residue behind when you try to use them. How about wrapping each in a small square of paper, then tape around that? This will avoid the sticky transfer.
Touching each other is ok PROVIDED they don’t form a circuit. If they’re in a straight line you’re okay, but I can imagine other configurations that might not be.
My main worry with tape is that when you are ready to use the batteries, some of the glue might stay on the battery, and that will interfere with the electrical contact between the battery and your device.
I was going to suggest some small portion cup containers or a drawer divider, but if you have enough of them r the divider is made of something conductive, it could be a problem.
I’ve seen one or two cases where someone had a battery in their pocket and it shorted against their keys causing it to overheat.
I also like the idea of wrapping them in paper (maybe bits of tissue?) then taping over that. That will definitely keep tape adhesive from being stuck on the batteries. Really good ideas in this thread.
See the thin black ring on the battery on the right? The flat dimpled part facing upwards is one pole of the cell and the rest of the body, with the writing etched into it, is the other pole of the battery. All coin and button cells will have this boundary ring.
As long as another metal object is not bridging the two poles together then there will be no short circuit and the battery will be fine.
The battery on the left is almost certainly shorting out the battery on the right, increasing the potential for the battery to leak or explode, or at very least, be dead by the time you want to use it.
Stacking for storage is a bad idea even if there is no circuit. If one of the batteries is iffy, it will affect the others by trying to discharge them.
Ordinary “Scotch” tape and such is less than ideal. If it was me, I’d use Kapton tape but I suspect not a lot of people have that lying around.
If I didn’t have the good stuff, I’d cut up small pieces of plastic bag/wrapping/whatever, wrap each battery in that and then tape over the wrapping. If using an index card it would be card, battery, plastic, tape.
Define “much”. A battery that is not quite as good as the others will affect the others even with the device turned off. And in a whole stack of button batteries there’s going to be at least one not-so-great battery.
This is the reason why battery makers warn you to not mix old and fresh batteries. Always replace all of them. Also part of the reason why you are also warned to take batteries out of devices if they aren’t going to be used for a while.
This is a very widely known issue.
You have 4 batteries in series. All nominal 1.5 volts. But they are self-discharging sitting there. If one is self-discharging faster then the others then you might have one in the middle trying to be at 1.39 volts while the others are at 1.4 volts. So it’s drawing off a little bit of power from the others. The internals of the battery forms a circuit.
Remember, these batteries could be sitting there for months, unused. So a tiny, little, minuscule drain from a battery trying to self discharge faster than it’s neighbors adds up.
Use the blue painter’s tape. It’s specifically designed to not leave a residue. I’ve pulled it down after months of being up (guy painted the office at work and left it over the doorway in a VERY seldomly used room) and it pulled right off.
ftg, what you’re describing is what would happen if the batteries were in parallel. If they’re in series, none of them would care at all what voltage the others are, because there’d be no mechanism to “try to make them all the same voltage”.
But how can one battery’s self-discharging affect another? If they are in series, they don’t even know (let alone care) that they are at different voltages.
