Captain’s Blog

Between the digital cameras, GPS, several remotes, electric toothbrushes, R/C toys, flashlights and other assorted electronics, we use a lot of rechargeable batteries, especially AAs. Last fall I needed a few more… so I bought 8 “BTY” brand AAs from Ebay. I didn’t look for any reviews… figuring the were so cheap they’d be “good enough” (how bad could they be, right?). For about $1.00 per battery, I wasn’t expecting much.

But I got even less than I bargained for.

The ratings on the batteries was “2500″ mah… but they never seemed to last very long. It didn’t make much of a difference until I got a Wii Fit for Christmas… then charging the batteries every 2 days with light use got to be a bit much. So I did some poking around, found a couple reviews… which said the BTY batteries were crap. Surprise!

Powerex got good reviews, and the price was right (although about 4x the price of the BTY’s). I also picked up a good charger: one that can cycle NiCD/NiMH AA/AAAs and tell you their true capacity.

Results? The new Powerex 2700’s almost held their rated capacity (2600-ish mah). The BTY 2500’s I tested averaged averaged around 470 mah (less than 20% their printed capacity!). Although Powerex was about 4x the price of the Ebay specials, they delivered over 5x the charge.

The Wii controllers, Wii Fit, and 2 GameCube Wavebird controllers use 12 AA’s: so I need to buy even more: you can bet I’ll be more carefull with Ebay purchases from now on

Just before leaving for Christmas vacation we had one of our first good snowfalls. I work on the 18th floor of our office building, and in the summer had taken a picture out my window to send to a friend in the US. When the snow came I tried to frame the same shot:

The smoke you see in the summer pic was from a car that had caught fire on a highway in the distance. Just thought I’d throw up these pics to show my friends in Kenora that it does snow in Toronto too!