This refers to the Straight Dope Staff Report: Should batteries be refrigerated for storage?
[url=“http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbattcharge.html”]
Another thing to watch out for is when you take those batteries out of the fridge on a hot, sticky summer day, better let them warm up before you stick them in your equipment. Otherwise you’ll have all kinds of condensation dripping from your batteries and inside your delicate equipment. We all know what happens on the outside of a cold can of soda or beer on a hot, humid day!
Here’s a link with the coding fixed.
This is misleading. Even when a battery is not connected, a small level of chemical reaction is unavoidable - batteries reliably degrade with time, even when never connected. A useful rule of thumb is that chemical reaction rates double with an increase of temperature of 10 degrees C - so refrigerating batteries will extend their shelf life.
And saying “the electricty won’t be there when you need it” isn’t accurate. Once the battery is at normal temperature it will work just fine, and even a battery freshly removed from the refrigerator will produce a fair fraction of its rated output. It is true that batteries will perform better when warmed to around room temperature; waiting about 15 minutes after removing them from cold storage should accomplish this (holding them in your hand helps).
The staff report recovers with its final paragraph:
Of course you could keep a couple of batteries in a drawer and the rest in the refrigerator.