In this era of cheap lithium pouch cells, it might seem mildly anachronistic to build AA batteries into a project. There are enough valid reasons to do so, however, and enough legacy hardware that still takes AAs, that it’s worth spending some time deciding which batteries to use. Luckily for us, [Lumencraft] over on YouTube has done the legwork in the video embedded below, and even produced a handy-dandy spreadsheet.
Each battery in the test underwent three separate tests. There was the “leave it in a flashlight ’til it dies” test for real-world usage, but also discharge curves logged at 250mA and 2A. The curves for each are embedded in the spreadsheet so you can see what to expect, along with the calculated capacity at each discharge rate. 2A seems like a fairly brutal load for AAs, but it’s great to see how these cells react to extremes. The spreadsheet also includes the cell’s cost to create a value ranking, which will be of great use to our readers in the USA, where it appears [Lumencraft] is buying batteries. The world market is likely to have the same batteries available, but prices may vary by region, so it’s worth double-checking.
In the video, [Lumencraft] also takes the time to explain the four battery types commonly found in AA format, and the strengths and weaknesses of each chemistry that might cause you to prefer one over another for specific use cases, rather than going by his value rankings. Unsurprisingly, there’s virtually no reason other than cost to go for alkaline batteries in 2025. However, lithium-ion batteries in AA form don’t really outperform NiMH enough to make the added cost worthwhile in all applications, which is why the overall “best battery” is a “PowerOwl” NiMH. Li-ion’s unspectacular performance is likely in part due to the inefficiencies introduced by a built-in buck converter and safety circuitry. On the other hand, some people might really appreciate that extra safety compared to bare 18650 cells.
The results here aren’t too dissimilar to what we saw earlier this year, but we really appreciate [Lumencraft] publishing his results as a spreadsheet for easy reference. The only caveat is that he’s taking manufacturers at their word as to how many cycles the batteries will last.
Oh, and just to be 100% clear — we are talking about double-A batteries, not Anti-Aircraft batteries. If anyone has an anti-aircraft battery hack (especially if that hack includes double-A batteries powering the AA batteries), please send in a tip.
I would gladly buy alkalines with even a little lower capacity, if I could be sure they won’t leak and destroy my devices. Duracells seem to be the worst, many times I have seen leaking Duracells in shop, still in their plastic bubble packs, with many years until best before date.
I’ve quit RayOVacs for the very same reason. Hoping my good luck with Home Depot’s HDX batteries last.
Agreed. Duracells have ruined more things than I can remember. I quit buying them years ago. Byer beware.
Several battery companies in the 1960’s had slogans like:
“If this battery leaks and damages your flashlight, we will send you a new one.”
“Should any device be damaged due to a battery defect, we will repair or replace it at our option.”
However, I never heard any testimonials from users who exercised those “guarantees”.
An image of the Duracell Copper-Top packaging on Amazon (2021) still has this guarantee printed on the battery packaging.
http://a.co/d/bA8FKKa
I took Duracell up on their leak-free guarantee about 10 years ago when their AA batteries leaked in a camera flash. I shipped the camera flash and the receipt to them, and quite a long time later (after I had given up on ever hearing from them) I received a check for exactly half of what I paid for the flash. If I had known they were only going to cover half the cost of the flash, I would have disassembled it and cleaned it up instead. I haven’t bought a single Duracell battery since.
Useless guarantee with a hard to replace and hard to repair device.
I have never had problems with Energizer Industrial AAs. They are my go to vs. Duracell
Yeah, we used thousands and thousands of aaa’s in my former job, and these and Varta was the only ones we trusted.
I collect and use a lot of devices with screw-only-accessible batteries (eg hand meters, environmental instruments…) … my usual tactic is to use either an LSD-NiMH or Lithium if compatible, or just… use zinc chloride, old school. Theoretically, these are even more leak prone – but if not actively(!) deep discharged they are less leak prone nowadays, and they don`t make quite the same mess when they leak.
Just a heads up to all. A brand new set of Ni-MH batteries requires 3 charge/discharge cycles to reach maximum storage capacity
I’ve had good NiMH results with a tenergy charger. I’ve also had some chargers that ‘boiled’ the battery til it looked like a hot dog (the heat shrank the wrapper til it split).
I’m probably overly cautious, but I only use chargers with a settable charge current and almost always charge AA NiMH at 200 mA so the cells stay cool. It takes longer but I rotate through multiple sets so I always have a fully charged set ready and it doesn’t matter that it takes a day to recharge.
Are there any keywords to find a low and slow NiMH charger? The lowest setting on mine is 500mA.
Unfortunately, I don’t have good way to search for that since the listings usually don’t state the minimum charge current. The last time I was shopping for one I constructed a list of chargers with the features I wanted and then tried to find the minimum charge current for each one. Sometimes I had to look at the specs. in the product pictures and other times I looked through the user manuals. I ended up buying this unit with different branding: https://www.amazon.com/MaximalPower-Universal-Battery-Rechargeable-Batteries/dp/B0DSCJFBSK
Annoyingly, it defaults to 500 mA so I change the current each time I insert a cell. I’ve also been very happy with my La Crosse BC-900 that defaults to 200 mA, but it’s long discontinued.
The Panasonic BQ-CC17 that comes with Eneloops is pretty slow and reliable.
The Tenergy ones are actually quite smart, I wouldn’t hesitate to try one.
It’s got to be a bit of a minefield with lithium AA: the same form factor can give you 1.7 V (LiFeS), 1.5 V (work-alike alkaline with built-in buck converter, sudden death at end of charge, and bonus RF noise generator), or the native 3.7 V Li-ion voltage ones, which Lumencraft chose not to mention.
The 14500 native 3.7 V cells are fantastic, but woe betide joe average consumer who puts it in his device expecting a 1.5 V cell.
I prefer the LiFePO4 14500 cells. For devices that take 2 AA cells, one of these and a blank work great.
Yeah, they have nice characteristics, but have half the energy capacity of a ‘normal’ lithium-ions. Somewhat lower peak output current too, but that’s not usually a significant limitation.
A really nice application for them is 4 in series to make a near-perfect replacement for a 12 V lead-acid cell, at a small fraction of the weight. Other lithium-ions make an awkward 3-cell (10.2-12.4 V) or 4-cell (13.6-16.8 V) voltage that don’t match up well with devices expecting lead-acid voltages.
Yes I was wondering if anyone had considered the “RF noise generator” issue… Not so great in a radio product.
I love the AA/AAA battery standard. Easily replaceable, cheap, found everywhere, etc. Having to recharge a freaking computer mouse weekly/monthly instead of just popping in a new alkaline AA after 12-18 months is just dumb. No, I don’t use “gaming gear” in case someone was wondering.
Long live the AA/AAA!
Im good with AA/AAA but for some reason I keep finding myself adding to a growing collection of devices that want those ridiculous AAAA batteries.
I believe AAAA have the same size of the 6 cells you find if you open a 9v battery.
Just in case you cannot find them separately…
This is such a stupid argument I can’t even ….
What about eg. C and B cells?
How did it look 20 or 30 years ago?
When(!) did AA/AAA become a “standard”?
What if that “standard” just gets replaced with a similar sized Li* standard?
It could even be designed in such a way that the device holding the cell knows the exact chemistry or even more (like SPD data from RAM modules).
We went from rs232 + DB9 to USB.
From charging via mini-USB through µUSB and now USB-C.
Change is possible in in theses cases often quite good in the “long” run.
Look at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nokia+battery+bl-5c – it’s a quasi standard today used in tiny wireless keyboards, radios (FM/AM/DAB/whatnot), etc.
There’s no reason whatsoever wireless keyboards, mice, headphones, mobile phones, cameras and so much more couldn’t use batteries from the same standard (a small set of specified cell sizes etc.).
Conventions become standards, there is no official process. We like AA/AAA, so it stays. Welcome to earth!
Going from micro USB to USB C wasn’t a step in the right direction though, so that kind of offsets your point.
Micro USB has better retention, and is far cheaper to manufacture both the ports and the cables.
USB C has major manufacturing challenges that has lead to a huge range of quality issues on the cables. The ports wear out much faster and have poor retention. It’s also a lot more expensive. It was not a positive change. Probably the only good thing that came out of it was forcing Apple to get on board with a standard, but it really doesn’t make that much of a difference as their products are still proprietary junk.
I’m not a fan of USB-C either. Recently I found out that a flashlight of mine with a USB-C charging port can only be charged with a USB-AtoC cable (at least the one USB-C charger I tried didn’t work with it).
But there are sooo many more examples of “standardized conventions” being “replaced”.
From flat earth through slavery to VHS and whatnot.
And it seems to me that more and more devices slowly transition to standardized Li* cells. I already mentioned the Nokia batteries and standard 18650 cells too (eg. the flashlight mentioned above and eg. a handheld oszi/multimeter (OWON HDS242))
You could have stopped there. Everything else you said just discredits that.
I genuinely wonder if the writer of this article has any idea about Alkaline cells.
They blow lithium out of the water in terms of self discharge and have no safety issues regarding over-discharging.
Maybe next time ask Chatgpt for the utility of Alkaline before writing the article?
I’m not sure if it was meant to be, but that last line in your comment comes off as deeply insulting.
In any case, alkaline batteries aren’t as good for self-discharge as they used to be– last time I bought a pack of Duracell some of them had actually self-discharged to the point of leaking, and no, it wasn’t some bizarrely old-stock; they weren’t even expired.
Note that [Lumencraft]’s suggestion is that we use a specific NiMH battery, not anything lithium. Lithium does indeed have its issues. As said in the article, you need to know your use case.
..and that’s not even touching the disposal convenience. I really dislike having to save up my old non-alkaline batteries for proper disposal. Spent Alkaline batteries being able to safely go right into the trashcan is a big selling point for me.
You sure? Seem to me like your deluding yourself for conveniences sake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alkaline_battery&useskin=vector#Disposal
If potassium hydroxide (alkaline battery juice) posed a disposal hazard in the quantities typically encountered when throwing away a few AAs, nobody would be able to burn wood at all (ashes contain far more KOH than a handful of batteries). That wikipedia article is simply wrong.
Yepyep. If you are looking at predictable current and AA meets your form constraints, the only real fail mode is leakage from a long term-dead battery. So really, we are only talking about devices that a person might leave unused for years. Also, was it just me, or did he rate the batteries by empirically testing their discharge, but taking their published life cycles on face value?
I also wonder why there was no review of Sodium Ion batteries with affordable, safe run to zero, and over 3000 cycles available.. may not be strictly AA size ATM, but many people here are designing hardware AROUND the battery form factor and can accommodate a better/safer solution.
It’s just because this reviewer was focused specificaly on AA batteries, and as you say, nobody has packaged sodium batteries. If know a good review of the various sodium ion batteries that are on the market, please send us a tip about it!
I would think rechargables like the famous 18650 would have killed the disposable battery market, I agree with other posters about those awful alkaline batteries with Duracell being the worst at leaking and ruining electronics
18650 didn’t “kill” the disposable battery market, but it DID make it noticeably worst.
Meaning, companies no longer feel a burning need to invest into R&D nor use the best technologies available, and prefer to crank out shoddy low-investment products for about the same price (relatively speaking) they were keeping inflated in the 1990s and early 2000s.
As a side note, pretty much ALL watch batteries are now seem to be (or quickly moving) into the category of “mail order only” with the well-known risks of getting bad batteries resold by all kinds of shady hoarders of bulk. Where I live (north Delaware) none are available at any stores, large or small, period. Radio Shack, we dearly need you back to fill the widening void the size of Solar System.
Building a product that’s glued shut around an 18650 makes things worse, but building a product that has a user-replaceable 18650 seems to me like a straightup win? I will agree alkaline cells have a few plusses but I’d be fine with the tradeoffs to use Li-ion in almost everything if the cells were accessible.
i hate them all. the alkalines all leak. all of them. i wonder if maybe the cheapest ones don’t leak?? the super expensive ones they have at the drug store all leak.
the lithiums are even more expensive (though the alkalines are now so expensive that the difference is almost irrelevant) and they don’t leak but they have a QC problem…i’ve been throwing them away left and right simply for not delivering enough voltage fresh out of the pack. i understand a range between 1.0V and 2.0V but these are delivering oddball and sometimes negative voltages, like the buck converter is defective. sadly, threw away a perfectly fine flashlight before i figured out the batteries were going south on their own.
nimh is fine if you don’t mind a dodgy charger and abysmal capacity but they top out at 1.2V so they are only useful for a few things.
these days i buy flashlights with integrated lipo. i feel pretty good about it because i don’t use flashlights enough to wear them out but i got a perfect flashlight and used its magnet to put it on my bike frame so i could see what i was doing, and then forgot it there until it fell off in the street :(
i keep throwing lithium AAs in my livingroom clock…the irony of putting a $4 battery in a $4 clock. oh well. at least it only needs a new one about every other year. i’d like to say my fluke meter is about the only other thing using AAs but i always seem to be buying new ones somehow.
i don’t need the best capacity or highest current, i have the idea i might even prefer prehistoric dry cells to what’s available today.
NiMH have much more capacity than alkaline. Maybe the problem is your dodgy charger. I have a good quality charger, and it preserves the life of the batteries. Now if we’re talking about selling a consumer device, you definitely can’t trust the average person to have a good charger.
NiMH hold their voltage longer than alkaline. So although they start at 1.2, they stay above 1V longer than alkaline. They also have lower internal resistance, so they maintain their voltage under load better than alkaline.
Sort of, but not actually accurate. NiMH do NOT have higher stored energy than alkalines, and their self-discharge limits their applications.
NiMH’s lower internal resistance makes it better for high-drain, repeated use. But in low-drain applications, alkalines shine: they have higher energy content and lower self-discharge.
You wouldn’t use alkalines in a flashlight or handheld games, but NiMH are a poor choice for thermostats, clocks, and even remote controls.
Yeah if i was driving radio control cars or something i might like nimh better than alkaline, but in that context i woud use lipo and it’s not even close. But most places i put removable batteries, an alkaline will last months or years. So nimh’s self-discharge and poor rechargability over the span of years is a real strike against it from my perspective. But yeah that’s just because of my usage patterns.
And fwiw i’m not sure i believe in “a good quality nimh charger”. I think you’re describing a product made out of equal parts hopium and unobtainium. Maybe a dash of nostalgium thrown in too. It seems like it should be possible to make a charger with a reasonable charge curve and peak detection. But all that i’ve seen, even at high prices, are either trickle chargers or burn-em-up chargers. Fundamentally i feel like most chargers are fixed voltage and/or fixed current. Lead-acid likes fixed voltage, lipo needs a limit on both current and voltage, but nimh needs something different from either. It’s 2025 and now sophisticated coulomb-counting BMS circuits are cheap and plentiful but all that energy is directed at lipo and i don’t see any big manufacturer focusing on perfecting nimh BMS now that it’s finally possible. When i googled “good quality nimh charger”, the first hit was a very impressive-looking…18650 charger…which is exactly what i expected sigh
Too bad you can no longer get the Li-ion AA cells with the built in buck converters from EBL. They completely disappeared all their product listings on Amazon. Which is odd as they just announced a new line of them (their fourth itteration). What happened?
maybe they also don’t like amazon, like me. :)
EBL is based in the US but manufactures their cells in China. Trump tariffs destroyed the cost analysis?
Depending on the desired form factor D Cell batteries may be better than all of the ones he tested. They usually cost the almost the same as AA in bulk. Also see 26650 and 21700 cells. Protected pouch cells are of course a thing, but are incredibly difficult to shop for if you have very specific dimensions in mind.
Good point about D cells. Those things used to be everywhere for good reason.
I like disposable lithium cells for their ability to be drop-in replacements for alkalines without the worry of leaking in devices like remote weather sensors. I also don’t need to worry my wife or kids replacing discharged cells in something I don’t closely control will accidently throw out perfectly good rechargeable cells.
Target… AA… Flak
Any thoughts on Project Farm’s video on NiMH batteries from a few years ago? I went with the Harbor Freight brand based on that analysis and haven’t been let down so far.
Why no XTAR 4150mWh 1.5v lithium?
And then you have AA-sized (14505) lithium rechargeable chemistries. I myself am integrating a 14505 LiFePO4 cell into my upcoming product.
None of the above.
I don’t trust any lithium battery tech.
I don’t trust Panasonic: I’ve had cells within 1 year of manufacture DOA.
Alkalines or carbon-zinc have limitations, but cheapness and some limited ability to be recharged makes up for that in some applications.
About half the NiMH AAs I’ve bought start self-discharging very badly after just a couple of cycles. A fully charged battery is flat within 2 months.
The batteries I’m happiest with are NiCd. The ones I’m using now (Camelion) hold a siginificant portion of their charge for years, and none have leaked yet. 1 Ah isn’t much compared to the fancy new chemistries, but it seems like all the bugs have been worked out.
Stay away from those Kirkland alkaline batteries. They are as bad or maybe even worse than Duracell when it comes to leakage. The last pack of them I used damaged multiple devices in less than a year.
I’ve switched to low self discharge NiMH for most of my devices. They are a huge improvement over the old NiMH batteries that would go dead in a month sitting on the shelf.
purportedly they are Duracell
https://www.housedigest.com/1653594/costco-kirkland-batteries-made-by-duracell-usa/
Honestly the only things in my house that still use AA cells are clocks. For which using cheap cells work the best as they tend to do better at the whole not leaking thing. Which makes sense considering that keeping cell chemistry stable gets harder the higher the energy-density.
Besides that: I tend to go for rechargeable cells for my own projects. Tends to be both more economic and ecological in the long run.
you have no remote controls that use AA?: Skeptical
Replaceable, standardized batteries aren`t “legacy” . Batteries that need more than a screwdriver to replace, and can make old equipment risky to keep, need to be made a footnote in history!
I can’t think of a practical use case for this sort of thing, but I want a device that stores AAs in a spring-loaded magazine and ejects spent batteries with a pump-action mechanism. Maybe a flashlight?