Change your Batteries

Change your Batteries: a reader asks…

How often should I change the batteries on my remote controls and other battery-powered devices? Does it hurt them to run with low batteries? How about a primer on how to deal with batteries?

Smartphones, cordless telephones, electric shavers, remote controls, garage door opener clickers – we’re surrounded by many small devices that run on batteries. Here’s a simple but often overlooked tip on what to do when they don’t work very well – change the battery! Read on for more detail and specific instructions & recommendations.

Some of these devices use rechargeable batteries, which have a limited lifespan in terms of how many times you can drain them down and charge them back up. You can usually get about 3 years of normal use (say, 500-800 drain/recharge cycles), but this can vary widely. After a couple of years of use, you will find that they don’t hold as much juice and don’t last as long before they need recharging. This is normal, but most people don’t pay attention until their device isn’t working well. In general though the rechargeable batteries for small devices like cordless telephones and electric shavers aren’t too expensive, so it’s probably worth it to replace them every other year, rather than wait for them to fail (Murphy’s law says that’ll be just when you need them most).

And some of these small devices use non-rechargeable batteries. These types of batteries have a very long shelf life (like a decade), but once drained you have to replace them. And as they get weaker, the devices they power may not work as well. Particularly for things like remote controls – you may find that you have to press buttons more than once to get them to work. Again, these batteries aren’t very expensive, so you should just replace them as soon as you see any problems with the device.

For some cell phones, the battery can be quite a bit more expensive. And for some smartphones (like the iPhone and some of the latest Android-powered smartphones), the battery is NOT user replaceable. For them you would need a professional service center to replace the battery, and for quite a bit of money. That may be why phone companies are so big on 2-year contracts for discounts on cell phones and smartphones – they figure in 2 years you’re going to want to replace it anyway with the latest and greatest, so why bother to make the battery replaceable? Of course, this trend is pretty recent, just a year ago, most smartphones had replaceable batteries (with notable exception, the iPhone). And regular cell phones for the most part still have user-replaceable batteries – if you’re on a budget, replacing the battery is a lot cheaper than buying a new phone.

But for the most part, batteries for your small devices are quite inexpensive, so just replace them when they don’t perform as well as they used to.