|
Forgive me,
for I have recharged my cellular-phone battery before it was fully drained
of power.
I have carried AA batteries loose in my pocket, where contact
with keys and other metal objects might have caused them to short, leak or
rupture. I have left worn-out batteries for months—yes, even years—in
toys and cameras, risking corrosion and battery leakage.
I have mixed old and new batteries in my portable compact-disk
player. I have stored batteries in damp places and at abnormal temperatures.
I have neglected to ensure proper alignment of the positive and negative
terminals of the batteries in my tape recorder, thus causing it to halt in
the middle of an interview.
I have unwittingly subjected rechargeable batteries to the vile
"memory effect." I have gone blurry on the difference between nickel cadmium
and nickel metal hydride. I have forgotten, till it was too late, about the
less visible members of the battery population: those empowering wristwatches,
arming the handsets of cordless phones, and protecting the volatile memory
of unpluggable appliances like VCR's. I have wasted batteries, mistreated
batteries, and disregarded hundreds of pages of written instructions, in
many languages, concerning batteries.
Citizens of the modern
world—those, anyway, who have chosen to possess pocket telephones,
camcorders, Diskmen, Gameboys or, worst of all, laptop computers—have
taken on a new and complex management role. We may as well add it to our
resumes: Strategic Coordinator of, and Footservant to, Batteries.
No one quite planned for this. Advancing technology always has
hidden costs that sneak along with it into the future, and somehow this most
mundane of objects has become a time-swallower in the everyday lives of this
consumers. During the generations we now realize were merely the dawn of
electrical age, the nuisance was confined to leakage in flashlights and Batteries
Not Included with toys. Now, in terms of care and feeding, rechargeable batteries
have changed all that. They rival pets in their demand for attention. At
least the average Rottweiler owner can get by without much knowledge of inorganic
chemistry.
"Each of the different battery chemistries do require a different
care," says Ken Hawk, a self-described "frustrated user" who has sensed a
market and founded 1-800-Batteries, one of a small platoon of specialty
companies—battery boutiques. "It's pretty foreign to most people, and
if you don't take good care of them, you can kill them in a month and a
half."
His company and others now offer thousands of words of instructional
text online and offline—hints, tips, how-to's—to supplement the
ponderous manuals you aren't reading anyway. These tips are cheery: "Burp
Your Battery"; "Clean Your Contacts"; "Work 'Em Out" (that is, in case you
have some free time: "to increase the life of your batteries, don't leave
them dormant for extended periods").
Have you, meanwhile, absorbed and retained Motorola's eight
or more pages of instructions for managing the cute pair of battleship-gray
batteries that came with that cellular phone, along with their "two pocket
automatic switching IntelliCharge II Rapid Charger"? Are you keeping your
eye on the "multicolor lamp" in each pocket? Anyway, do you know the difference
between "rapid charging" and "trickle charging"? Do you use the little tabs
on the batteries to record their status? Once you put the batteries in the
charger, do you remember to take them out within 24 hours?
Standardization came early
to the world of consumer batteries, where the vast majority of the billions
sold each year belong to the big five: AA, AAA, C, D, or the quaint-looking
matchbox-size "9-volt." Double-A batteries alone account for about half of
battery sales in the United States; you can buy black-market and gray-market
versions with foreign-language packaging from street-hawkers, and if you
ever actually computed your household's annual Double-A budget, you would
be unamused. By contrast, designers of modern consumer electronics—laptop
computers, especially—have thrown standardization to the winds. A given
brand—the IBM ThinkPad, for example—can require a dozen or more
different and incompatible batteries, depending on model number. Meanwhile,
the laptop makers are also letting their power-hungry processors and display
screens get ahead of battery capacity, forcing users to carry extra batteries
on long flights. So 1-800-Batteries carries an astonishing assortment of
6,000 different types of battery—and these days, you're expected to
buy a few for the road.
For many people, the most frustrating single fact of battery
management is that most rechargeable batteries do need to be drained of power
before they are charged again. A laptop-computer battery with half of its
charge remaining is a particularly unwelcome object as you begin packing
for your plane trip; you are supposed to use that charge before you fill
it up again. Otherwise, particularly with nickel cadmium—the most common
of the rechargeable-battery chemistries—the "memory effect" takes hold.
Because of gas bubbles building up on the active cell plates, the battery
actually remembers that it was used for only a half-hour before
recharging—and becomes, henceforth, a battery with a half-hour useful
life.
The more modern types, nickel metal hydride and the even more
promising lithium ion, avoid the memory effect, though consumers are still
expected to condition them by discharging them and recharging them several
times. The next trend will be "smart" batteries, with embedded computers
monitoring their status and, just maybe, taking over some of the management
chores from consumers.
Still, the technologies for generating electricity in miniature
packages have not leapt forward at the kind of pace associated with computers.
Batteries remain the worst obstacle to progress in designing the next generation
of portable computer or electric car. They have not obeyed Moore's Law—the
observation that chips of a given size and price double in capacity every
year and a half. If they had, our automobiles would be running quietly and
fumelessly for months on double A's. Instead . . . well, forgive
me. |
|
