General Purpose Tools

Dummy Batteries

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Allows you to adjust the voltage to compensate for various battery technologies

These are 0 Volt dummy batteries. They are just a metal cylinder with an insulating sleeve in the form factor of various battery types such as AA and AAA. You substitute one or more real batteries with one of these and they provide a low resistance conducting path. They are useful when a device uses multiple batteries in series and you want to use different battery technologies. Do NOT use them with real batteries in parallel or you will short out your real batteries. One use case is 3V lithium with one AA dummy battery instead of two 1.5V AAs. In many modern LED flashlights the device has an internal voltage regulator so the battery voltage doesn’t have to be exact. In another use I have a Metz camera flash that uses 6 AAs in series for 9V. I prefer Eveready AA lithium, which are around 1.75 V. I was concerned that six of these would produce too much voltage, 10.5V for this expensive flash unit so I installed 5 AA lithiums and one dummy, producing 8.5V. This still charged the flash faster than six AA alkalines and has more amp-hours and lower resistance.

-- Bruce Bowen 11/9/16

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