I just went out to buy some 9 Volt batteries because the fire alarm decided to be my alarm clock today and tell me, quite loudly, it was hungry and needed more batteries (/s). I replaced the battery and went to go pick up some more batteries for when the other fire alarms require replacement batteries, and I had thought, if those batteries stay in the package for an extended amount of time, will they still have the same amount of life in them as when i first bought them? Or will they lose power and life, even though they are sitting in a sealed package?
In: Technology
All batteries have some degree of self discharge. How fast they self discharge depends on the battery chemistry; nickel chemistries have a very high self discharge, while alkaline are very slow, which makes them stable on the shelf.
I don’t really know the details of how self discharge works. It’s down to the chemistry itself, the charges want to balance out, and there’s a very high resistance path between cathode and anode that electrons slowly leak across.
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