Battery Hogs

[Pike]

I have an "electronic butterfly in a jar" thing, which is pretty cool, but it chews through batteries like nobody's business. I have to put new batteries in there every two or three weeks. I think something's wrong with it.

What is the biggest battery hog you have ever had the displeasure of using? HARD MODE: Something besides Sega Game Gear.

[Bunny]

This god damn clear Wii controller uses batteries like Americans consume McDonalds.

[Sephex]

I have an "electronic butterfly in a jar" thing, which is pretty cool, but it chews through batteries like nobody's business. I have to put new batteries in there every two or three weeks. I think something's wrong with it.

What is the biggest battery hog you have ever had the displeasure of using? HARD MODE: Something besides Sega Game Gear.

I used to briefly own a Sega Nomad. The Game Gear had nothing on that thing.

[Mirage]

Smartphones.

Playstation Portable.

[Værn]

An old wireless mouse. It took a new pair of batteries every other day if I forgot to turn the thing off...

[Hollycat]

Smartphones.

Playstation Portable.

Lots of people complain about the PSP. I must either be the luckiest person on the planet or you all consider 5/5 hours to be very short.

[Jinx]

inb4 vibrator

[Jessweeee♪]

omg the WiiMote. Especially if you use the internet browser a lot.

[Freya]

Yeah those goddamn wiimotes. They chew through batteries.

[Rebellious Eagle]

My Xbox controller, ugh

[Roto13]

The only things I own that use replacable batteries are my Wiimotes, my PS3 Bluray remote, and my camera. The bluray remote seems to drain batteries pretty quickly if I actually use it with my PS3 through bluetooth, but I don't do that anyway. I only use the remote for my PS 3D Display, so IR only.

I just realized how boring this post is.

[KentaRawr!]

TV Remotes. I want my batteries to last a life time, not a measly decade! :mad2:

But for real, Wii Remotes.

[Zeldy]

Yeah those goddamn wiimotes. They chew through batteries.

I had a hungover day dedicated to playing Skyward sword, when the batteries 'depleted' and I searched high and low, pestered all my housemates, anything to not go outside. In the end I sacrificed my alarm clock which I'd had since I was about 12, with the same batteries no word of a lie, and that got me another hour. I ended up going to Tesco. :'(

[KentaRawr!]

Yeah those goddamn wiimotes. They chew through batteries.

I had a hungover day dedicated to playing Skyward sword, when the batteries 'depleted' and I searched high and low, pestered all my housemates, anything to not go outside. In the end I sacrificed my alarm clock which I'd had since I was about 12, with the same batteries no word of a lie, and that got me another hour. I ended up going to Tesco. :'(

Poor alarm clock. I wonder how much longer it would've gone with the same batteries before it depleted?

[Hollycat]

Wow, I don't know how old you are, but I'm guessing long enough to make this interesting.
I have a tamogatchi that still works somewhere.

you know what really ate batteries?
those boxes with screens on them that allowed you to make a playstation portable.

[Zeldy]

Yeah those goddamn wiimotes. They chew through batteries.

I had a hungover day dedicated to playing Skyward sword, when the batteries 'depleted' and I searched high and low, pestered all my housemates, anything to not go outside. In the end I sacrificed my alarm clock which I'd had since I was about 12, with the same batteries no word of a lie, and that got me another hour. I ended up going to Tesco. :'(

Poor alarm clock. I wonder how much longer it would've gone with the same batteries before it depleted?

It'd started going crazy though, and it got to the point where my alarm was a significant amount of minutes faster than it should of been, and the time I decided to make it right I got so confused that I ended up late for school. That was about 5 years ago, I had to put it back to being about 10 minutes fast in order to get back my routine.

[Mirage]

Oh yeah i have this one remote for the receiver for my digital fiber optic cable TV which uses those really flat small batteries which cost 4 times as much as regular batteries and last half as long. Seriously, i've switched batteries for that piece of shit 3 times over the course of two years, while I've changed the batteries for my TV remote once over 5 years.

[Loony BoB]

PS3/360 controllers. Luckily you can still play while charging with my PS3 controller, but 360 ones need to be constantly charged whenever we start a new game with them, and they can take ages. :(

[Pike]

My 360 controller is actually pretty good with batteries. Maybe it's because it's only six months old or so. Or maybe it's because I've got a bunch of wired controllers too and when I want to play 360 I just pick a controller at random.

[blackmage_nuke]

Most of my battery consumption items have been rather long lasting. One exception is an old miniature table fan I had but that wasnt so much draining batteries as it was causing them to leak a strange powder I could only assume to be acid.

[Iceglow]

My phone eats the battery like power was going out of fashion. But then my phone in terms of phone age is relatively old now and battered to smurf. Still when 3 or 4 people get in to heavy texting convo's with me I wind up with 50% power pretty quickly.

My 360 controllers seem to last forever, literally can get over a week's solid gaming from a single charge but then that is my rechargeable batteries being awesome rather than the controller.

Most batteries expire within 4 years of manufacture. I call bulltit on anyone claiming to have the same batteries in something for longer than that... why? The batteries would degrade and corrode too much they'd actually burst through their metal casing (which btw is reactive to acid) and you'd end up with the white crusty stuff that comes from metal oxides when formed using high strength acid or alkaline. One thing to remember with batteries is that the advice to remove them from the device is because they're reacting constantly not just when you switch it on so as long as you've batteries in something and there's a positive and negative node/coil attached there is a circuit that is active. The on/off power switch merely implements a breaker to connect the flow of electrons to the rest of the device instead of a closed circuit around the battery.

[Hollycat]

My Ps3 controller lasts a long time, one time I left town for a week with the ps3 still on came back it was still going, played probably 30 hours that week and it was still at 1 bar

[I Took the Red Pill]

My Droid eats up battery like...well, there have been enough shitty similes in this thread, I'll just leave that part up to the reader's imagination. But it's really bad.

[sharkythesharkdogg]

My hand-me-down Iphone has horrible battery life, but no one is surprised about that.

My PS3 controllers last a long time actually. Of course I mostly use it for Netflix, so just sitting there on instead constantly transmitting signals from button inputs like a video game might help that lifespan.

[Shlup]

I can kill my Android's battery in about an hour.

[Hollycat]

My laptop.
At 50% sound and 50% brightness with one video open. 45 minutes max.

[Pike]

Oh right I forgot about my laptop. I'm to the point now where I don't use it unless it's plugged in.

I have a super oldschool iPod Mini somewhere that I don't use anymore. The reason I don't use it anymore is because its battery life kept getting more and more pathetic as time went on and by the end it was down to like 45 minutes.

[Mirage]

My PS3 controllers also last pretty long if the games I play aren't vibration-heavy. I think a 20-30 hours of non-rumble gameplay sounds about right.


My laptop.
At 50% sound and 50% brightness with one video open. 45 minutes max.

The speakers are just a drop in the ocean, really. CPU/GPU load, HDD usage and screen brightness is what kills it. Not to mention, cheap laptops with big displays almost always cut corners when it comes to battery life in order to save production costs.

Other than that, your battery might also be worn out. There is a limit on how many charge cycles they can deal with.

[Hollycat]

I've had it less than a year, bought it new, it's always been like this. Do not buy Lenovo laptops.

[DMKA]

My phone is an HTC Inspire, and it's the most ridiculously fast battery draining phone I've ever seen. I could go the whole day without turning the screen on and I'd still be lucky if I had any juice at all left.

But hands down, the worst culprit, the most pitifully inefficient battery powered device I've ever witnessed is the Sega Nomad.

http://retrothing.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/seganomad.jpg

This thing took six AA batteries and you got an hour of play on a fresh set of batteries, if you were lucky. And no, I'm not exaggerating. It was usually more like 40 minutes.

[Sephex]

Yes, another Nomad user! My experience was worse, for the record. However, when I did have it, the poor thing was used. So yeah, might as well carry the plug around with it...