Battery Mystery

[Terry]

I can assure you that it would work with three 1.5V the correct way round and the 4th the wrong way round, simply because it did!      

That doesn't mean that the 4th one was always reversed, though!

I think you would immediately notice the difference in performance if you fitted a fresh 3V battery of cells (1.5 + 1.5 + 1.5 - 1.5 = 3) instead of the correct 6V battery, therefore all of the cells must originally have been correctly polarised but one only had a low capacity, so it got reversed charged when it was no longer capable of contributing its share of the load.  Therefore, the battery initially had a voltage of six but this would have rapidly have dropped to three volts after one cell was exhausted, although over what period of time the drop would have occurred, I don't know.

In the case of my radio - only used occasionally in the bathroom - it probable took two or three weeks to drop from good to abysmal but it was 2 or 3 years ago now, so I really couldn't define it more accurately.

In the case of my 3-cell doorbell, a 1.5V battery of two correct and one reversed cell would never have functioned in the first place!

[Sparks]

I believe I have solved the problem. I am pretty sure my wife put one battery in the wrong way round! The set worked perefectly for while, during which time, the incorrectly installed battry reversed its polarity. Just for interest, I removed one of the new batteries and put it back the wrong way round. The receiver worked as normal.
Bob

[Kalee20]

That wouldn't fit the facts - if one battery was put in backwards, when you switched the radio on, it would have got charged by the others so reinforcing its 1.5V-ness. It wouldn't have reversed.

I reckon the batteries were put in correctly, t6hey would all discharge in that case. The one with the lowest capacity would reach zero first, and then possibly reverse. But the fact that the others were down to 1.1V indicates that they were on their last legs too, so really the match could have been reasonably good as a set, even if not perfect.

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
It's actually a very common problem, saw it many times in Remote controls, ask any TV engineer....... I guarantee you we've all had the problem many many times.

[Pat Pending]

Here's my experience with Duracell...

One or more in a package being completely dead from new, but low resistance, if you stick them in without checking, (why would you?), the voltage across 4 of them would be 4.5 instead of 6v, and would no doubt run a radio for instance but appear to rundown quickly as the dead cell charges in reverse (?) No doubt leaking its contents inside your device in the process.

This has happened on a number of occasions to me, and I no longer buy their QUALITY PRODUCTS, their QC people asked for the offending cells to be returned when I complained but denied receiving them and offered no compensation.

Andy.