An AA and AAA battery recharger is one of those pieces of equipment you’ll find extremely valuable if you have a kid who loves to play with battery powered toys because they are the most common batteries you’ll need for toys. Sure, you can use the batteries for other devices like your wireless mouse, a Bluetooth keyboard or even your baby-phone… but let’s be real, it’s the RC toys that will be using them the most.
My reasons for buying a charger 🙂
I bought the recharger above because my four year old asked for a remote control car for his birthday… and every dad knows that RC cars are really truly super fun BUT drain batteries like angry vampires. Unless we’re talking about the more expensive RC toys that have their own integrated rechargeable battery (although I’ve seen toys with rechargeable batteries that were not very reliable). I was browsing for a recharger around local shops and when I saw the Duracell Value Charger that came with AA batteries AND had the option to charge AAA batteries as well I looked at my wife, raised my eyebrow and said: don’t you see, we could become independent and went on a rant how this would save us incredible amounts of money in the long run. By some miracle she agreed and by an incredible divine intervention it turned out I was actually right. My kid’s uncle had gotten him a really cool and powerful RC Lamborghini Gallardo which sucked the life out of a set of energizer batteries within an hour of play. You should have seen the smile on my face when I opened up a plastic box inside which I had carefully placed a fully charged set of AA Duracell batteries. I replaced the batteries and the car seemed even more powerful and it took us over a few hours of play to drain the batteries, the AA rechargeable Duracell batteries seemed like monsters to me then!
Other than the RC cars my kid plays with ( I also play with them of course 🙂 ) I use the AAA batteries with other devices such as a reading light and baby phones and over the last several months only once was a battery not charged, well it was… but it lasted really short, like 2 days. When I switched the battery with another AAA Duracell rechargeable battery everything was fine and later I recharged the battery in question.
Other Chargers
There are a bunch of rechargeable batteries out there and a fair amount of chargers like for example the Panasonic model or the Energizer and they all come with excellent reviews and you should be ok if you get one from a known company like these. What you definitely should avoid is fast chargers because they destroy batteries and severely decrease their lifespan.
The most common complaints people have with the Duracell recharger is that it can only charge batteries in even numbers (2 or 4) , this is not such a big inconvenience for items and toys that use odd numbers, you can just put away the extra battery and have it ready for a new item. People tend to complain that it takes too long to charge and maybe it does if you use it on a regular daily basis to power machines like cameras and other professional devices. But to keep your kids toys and other devices working it will do just fine and as I’ve said before the fast chargers destroy batteries quickly. You won’t need to recharge every day or sometimes even for weeks but in the long run you’re sure to save money.
EDIT:
- 11/23/2014 – The AA batteries are on their 4th run with my kid’s RC car and the AAA batteries on their 2nd run, everything is running smooth 🙂
- 7/9/2015 – The AA batteries are I believe on their 7th run and they’ve officially saved money for us. I put the AAA batteries in our two Panasonic cordless phones and they’ve been working like a charm for weeks now.
- 8/6/2015 – Lost the cordless phone… the batteries lasted for days so we didn’t bother putting it on the recharging station and our 1 year old daughter must have thrown it into the trash; awesome :D!
- 9/30/2016-Â OK! So, 3 of the AA batteries were left outside for the past few months. We totally forgot about them. I remembered one evening and thought they would be completely destroyed… but they’re not! They’re still working :D. Used the opportunity to start teaching my kid about energy saving and the value of it.
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