What’s the Best Way To Store Your Batteries?
How much do you know about storing household batteries for the long term? Until I started prepping, I did not have a clue. Even after I started to prep, I was unsure, although it did make sense to store batteries at room temperature, not too hot and not too cold. Still, when the topic came up while out with friends, some wise guy mentioned keeping batteries in the freezer and I was lost.
Shortly after that, I check snopes.com and learned no, batteries should not be refrigerated or frozen. Snopes is not always correct so I decided to ask my pal Ron Brown for his opinion. Ron is a retired industrial engineer and my go-to person when it comes to this kind of thing.
Rather coincidentally, he told me he had already performed a battery test using standard run of the mill flashlights and run-of-the-mill carbon zinc batteries. Here are the results of his testing. You might be surprised. Or not.pinpoint of light and the refrigerated/frozen batteries a brighter glow.
BUT, as a practical matter, they all reached the end of their useful life at the same time (six hours) at which point they had equivalent brightness. You could have switched the labels around on the flashlights and no-one would have been the wiser.
I concluded that attempting to extend battery shelf-life by refrigeration was, and is, a waste of time. And that’s worth knowing, is it not? This was not, and is not, armchair theory. This was a real test with real batteries. If you repeat the test, you can expect the same results. Call it the “scientific method” in action.
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