I’ve been doing it for years. Flashlight, remote, I’ll try it with anything that has disposable batteries. It dies at an inconvenient time. Open it up, swap the two batteries for each other’s position, and it works! Even if only for a bit.
Why do two “dead” batteries in the other order provide more output than their initial positions?
In: Technology
Electrical resistance in a layer of oxidation on the battery contacts will reduce the output of a weak discharged battery, in a way that really makes the weakness obvious. Scraping away some of the oxidation layer happens naturally when swapping around batteries.
In fact, old-school electrical relays were designed to allow a very slight deflection of the electrical contact. That allows a subtle scraping action at the start of every electrical connection, so the contacts are self-cleaning.
Separately, chemical diffusion will always seem to make a battery recover slightly when it’s not ouputting current. The old-school Eveready batteries used a “Nine Lives” logo to highlight this effect in their batteries.
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