In today's video, we're taking a look
at the difference between full batteries
and batteries that have been drained of all of their juices.
How are they different?
And how can you easily tell them apart?
[Music]
We've got a bunch of batteries.
So far, these batteries are in good condition,
but we want to do some tests to see
what's different between a fully charged battery,
and it fully drained battery.
And we want to see if we can figure out
how you can tell the difference between the two.
Here's the basic idea.
We have seen
that you can bounce batteries to tell
whether or not they are charged.
So we're going to try that, see what's different,
and then try a few other tests as well.
First step is we need to drain power out of these.
So I've got a flashlight.
When I bought it on the packaging,
it said that it gave like two and a half hours of light.
So I figured we can put the battery in there,
see how dim the flashlight gets,
and then take it out, and see how much worse it is.
After that, we're going to put batteries
in for progressively smaller increments of time to see
if we can get a perfect scale of a fully charged battery
to a fully dead battery, and see what the differences are.
So we've got batteries in this flashlight, and now,
what we want to do is just let it sit for a long time.
We want to drain all of the power out of these batteries.
All right, we have now taken batteries,
and we have drained them a lot.
We actually had one set of batteries we left in
overnight to really try and drain them off,
and that wasn't even necessarily quite enough.
So we then took those batteries,
and we put them into a remote control car,
and left it running to try and drain them even more.
Other than that,
we have batteries at 15 minute increments
from 2 hours and 15 minutes all the way down to none.
So first thing, I want to try that bounce test.
Everybody says that you can bounce the batteries,
and a perfectly charged battery isn't going to bounce,
and the one that's pretty close
to empty is going to have a lot more bounce to it.
First thing I want to do is just holding it over the counter,
and dropping it, the same way anyone would
if they're pulling batteries out of a junk drawer,
and they're not sure, like, oh, is this good battery?
Is it a bad battery?
This is supposed to be the super easy way to test.
If this works at all,
I want to scale it up, and have just a whole setup
that will drop all of the batteries at once,
from fully charged to completely drained,
and see if we can get them to just bounce
in a nice little array.
But first, let's try
the "I just found the battery in a junk drawer" test.
[Music]
So the one at 2 hours and 15 minutes,
quite a bit of bounce to it.
But the one that's fully charged.
It's like the one ring.
There's no bounce.
Editors, can we put in the clip
of the One Ring hitting the ground, please?
So, I want to know if there's a weight difference.
They don't feel any different to me.
But that doesn't mean that it's not there.
As far as I can tell just holding them,
they feel the same.
I'm just trying to see like is there any slight bowing,
or change in like how flat any parts of it are.
I really am not seeing anything,
so I don't think that's changed.
I think that's intentional.
They don't want the battery to distort
as you use it.
We have a very sensitive scale.
This thing is designed for measuring gunpowder,
and we've got it set to grams right now.
So let's do a test.
All right, let's get one of our fully charged batteries.
Here we go.
It's fully charged?
Fully charged.
>> No marks on it. >> Alright.
24.4.
[Music]
24.45.
[Music]
24.25.
So we do have a little bit of variation here.
Amost all of these batteries are from one package.
They all came together, and you can see
that they actually say USA printed on top.
Yeah.
These two batteries came with the flashlight,
and they do not have USA printed to the top of them.
So they are slightly different in some way.
So this is the one
that we just tried the bounce test with.
This is at 2 hours 15 minutes of use.
24.25.
Now, that would be exactly the same as the full battery
from this same batch.
That's true.
Also 2 hours and 15 minutes,
just the other one.
24.35.
Still very much within the same range.
Yeah, grab a one in the middle, and see which--
30 minutes.
[Music]
24.4.
So I'm going to say the weight,
and I didn't think the weight it was going to change.
Nothing is escaping.
Nothing is leaving the battery as you're using it.
And so, the mass is the same,
it's not going to be any different.
Even though I was pretty sure that was the case,
I did want to test.
Because maybe something was escaping.
But it seems that the mass is unchanged.
We've now had these three batteries
running our remote-control car for a little bit
after they ran the flashlight for a long time.
So these two batteries were in the flashlight overnight,
and then to really try and drain them the rest the way,
we threw them into this remote control car.
We drove that around.
0% batteries versus full battery.
We've already done bounce tests,
and we've seen that our full battery will not bounce,
whereas our empty battery will.
[Music]
Not bad.
So empty, also empty, full.
Let's take our voltmeter.
and test it on the batteries to see
how much power each of these have.
First off, a full battery.
Okay, we are getting a reading of 1.6 volts, almost exactly.
Just a hair over.
1.6 volts.
Now, our drain batteries.
This is as dead as we can get it.
[Music]
We are looking at 0.0981.
So that's not zero.
It's not showing
that there's no power left in this battery.
But in the RC car, this wasn't working anymore.
So a dead battery actually still has over half
of what a battery has initially.
In terms of voltage, at least.
Yeah.
Now, how well
that translates into usable power probably depends
on what device you're using.
If I put these two dead batteries in our flashlights,
we're still getting light out of the flashlight.
So it's not a hundred percent drained clearly,
but in something
like the RC car, it needs a little bit more power.
Especially if the wheels are actually in contact
with the ground,
it can barely overcome the coefficient of static friction
to get this thing moving.
For the most part,
it just like limps along at a quarter of a mile an hour.
Whereas with full batteries,
it actually kind of zooms around a little bit.
Full battery, 1.6-ish volts.
Empty battery, 0.98 volts.
There's one that was
in the flashlight for only 15 minutes.
1.476.
That's a quick drop off.
Yeah, I would not have expected that much--
Even in 15 minutes,
it goes from 1.6 to 1.47.
Like that just...
We tried weighing the batteries,
and now, we've used a voltmeter.
And we can definitely tell
with the voltmeter what's a good fresh battery,
and what's been used.
And it drops off pretty quick.
I was surprised at how fast.
So, after 15 minutes, you can already see
that you've got a 0.2 drop in it.
That's kind of insane given the fact that
at the end of running something in a car
until it would no longer go anywhere, it was 0.98.
It's clearly not a linear scale for using the voltage
in a battery.
It drops off very quickly at first,
and then levels out quite a bit.
We had to run these batteries
for a long time to get them below 1 volt.
We've got some Masonite, we got a board,
and we've got some strips.
We are just going to glue all these strips on,
at least one battery wide,
and then have just sort of a rail system.
And all of these batteries
will just fall down next to each other,
and we get a good shot, a test,
the batteries in line from a completely
charged battery to completely discharged battery.
[Music]
Here's our battery track.
In theory, we should be able to take a battery,
and drop it.
It worked. It dropped.
Fell all the way down with pretty much no resistance,
that's the goal right there.
[Music]
We've got our battery rail box set up,
and hopefully,
the automatic drop system all works smoothly.
Let's give this a test.
Our batteries are currently in line from fully charged
to very much depleted.
3, 2, 1.
[Music]
That was cool.
It was cool.
They didn't all hit the ground at the same time.
It didn't.
That's really cool.
Yeah, that looks...
That looks good.
Like once we can actually get it to go on the right speed.
I think it's going to work.
I think so.
[Music]
We are having just a little bit of trouble getting all
the batteries to drop at the same time.
I think they're sticking a little bit to the paint.
And so we actually just added some corn starch on the inside,
to sort of a dry lubricant, and...
It's going to be a little powdery,
but I think it's going to work a little bit better.
Yeah, this should be good.
All right.
3, 2, 1.
[Music]
From a higher spot this time.
Oh, no.
3, 2, 1.
[Music]
Look, it kike hits it.
That's it.
No-- Oh, one of them fully jumped up out of the frame.
[Music]
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