In short, there will be some cases where adding a switching supply may greatly improve battery service life there will be others where it is useless or counterproductive. If the device has a switching supply built into it, adding a second one in front of it may offer little benefit. it's a motor which periodically needs move something a certain distance) the amount by which scaling the voltage increases or decreases the current drawn from the battery may be larger or smaller than the amount by which it affects the duration. If the device draws power intermittently, and the amount of time it requires power will vary with voltage (e.g. If the useful performance of the device varies with voltage, scaling the battery voltage up may offer enhanced performance at the cost of reduced battery life scaling it down may offer better battery life in exchange for reduced performance. A win-win.Ī buck-boost switcher which raises the voltage significantly above what the device would need for operation will waste energy whenever the battery voltage is between what the device needs and what the booster gives the device. If one has a device which will draw 20mA continuously at any voltage above the minimum required for operation, and will work equally well at any such voltage, a buck-boost switcher that scan scale a battery's voltage up or down so the device always sees that minimum voltage may both reduce the amount of current drawn from batteries which output more voltage than the device would need, and allow continued operation with batteries which produce less voltage. You'd be better off with rechargeable batteries. So you could only ever be increasing the total energy draw from the batteries by a very small amount, and that amount is almost certain to be consumed by the reduced efficiency from adding another switching regulator to the system.
The more current you draw, the more the terminal voltage drops due to internal series resistance, the faster the battery dies, and the less total energy you get out of it. However, the total energy you get out of a battery by putting a fixed power load on it is very complex at lower voltages, you necessarily draw more current, to make up the fixed power (P=VI). If you've made the dropout voltage higher than it already was, you've made the device run for a shorter time! If you've made the dropout voltage lower, then you should be able to run the same device until a lower voltage point on the batteries. The only possible effect you can have is to change the dropout voltage.
If the load was already fixed power, adding another regulator in front of it doesn't change that. Now, the lamp runs bright until the dropout voltage is reached, at which point the lamp stops entirely. By putting a boost converter on the batteries into a resistive load, you're effectively turning the lamp into a fixed power load. You get a little time running bright, and a long time running dim. Your bulb gets dimmer as the batteries die, but the dim bulb consumes less energy.
A fixed power load is generally a switching regulator, which has a minimum dropout voltage.Ī fixed resistance load doesn't much care what the input voltage is the power out of the batteries will drop with the square of the voltage. In general, these loads are either fixed resistance (like a basic flashlight) or fixed power (like almost anything electronic beyond a certain complexity). Our goal is to keep the load on the batteries running as long as possible.
Is there any benefit to using a voltage booster on batteries that are below a device's cutoff/operating voltage? (Certainly not the 80% that Batteriser claims we throw away.) While I think it's obvious that the Batteriser people have failed to grasp some basic concepts, I do question whether a joule thief type circuit is a good way to utilize remaining energy in a cell. They believe that a power supply is an "unfair" test because it behaves different from batteries, or that skeptics failed to consider battery internal resistance, etc.
The latter two videos primarily deal with the Batteriser promo team's failure to understand how to measure voltage provided by batteries under load versus out of circuit.
It is basically a joule thief that is in a tiny package that slips over the cell.ĭave Jones of EEVBlog did a video debunking the product: The Batteriser is a crowd-funded product intended to extend battery life by boosting the voltage.