re: Are All Battery Brands Equal? If Not Which One Is The Best?

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The Sanyo/Panasonic Eneloop batteries are the way to go for most every application

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I bought some a few years ago but I don't use them anymore. They're good for things that aren't picky about voltage, but at the time the only things I needed them for were a couple remotes, a wall clock, and a damned soap dispenser, and the eneloops wouldn't run any of them for more than a week. It was just too much battery swapping and charging for me when a set of 4 alkalines cost a buck or two and last months.

It's not that the eneloops didn't have as much capacity as the alkalines, because they did. The problem was the eneloops are only around 1.2 volts fully charged, and devices that use AA's expect 1.5 volts from them. When an alkaline is down to 1.2 volts, it's pretty much dead. But I still see lots of people who love eneloops, so I guess I was just unlucky with the types of things I was using them in. Like I said, the remotes and wall clock started acting like the batteries were weak after only a week, and that damned soap dispenser evidently had a protection circuit so that it wouldn't work at all below a certain voltage, which was apparently just under 1.2 volts.